In addition to the public events we hold at Yelp, every Friday an engineer at Yelp presents on a topic they’re passionate about. The talks range from topics far afield from computers, to technical deep dives on some of the core trade-offs we make at Yelp. I’m happy to share one of the latter today, as   Garrett J. takes us through the history of databases. From Codd’s description of the relational model, through the challenges Cassandra was designed to solve, this video gives a great overview of current options in database technology. <iframe frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/65601864" width="500"></iframe>  Slides -...

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Last Tuesday, we stepped out of our technical meetup norm and hosted an event group whose mission is to improve the lives of women around the world. Spark is an organization comprised of a network of young philanthropic entrepreneurs. Their members offer pro bono services to up-and-coming women’s organizations. Spark works on a global level to reach out to the next generation’s leaders and offers mentorship opportunities to young women. We love what they are doing and are happy to announce that we’ll be hosting them again next month! Come visit us on May 15th for a movie screening of...

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What projects do interns work on? What are some of the machine learning algorithms we use to solve real world problems? Do interns work in teams solving critical problems, or just do small research tasks? These are some of the questions I frequently get when talking with candidates, so I invited Shengwei L., former intern and now full-time employee, to talk about one of his projects. As you can see, interns at Yelp get to apply the principles they learned in school to make Yelp better for millions of people. They sit alongside full-time members and take responsibility for projects...

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Sudarshan G., Yelp’s current leading engineer behind mrjob, writes this week about an exciting opportunity to contribute to one of our most popular open source libraries: mrjob. We are happy to announce that we are running a mrjob sprint at Pycon 2013. mrjob is an open source Python framework for running Python scripts to process large amounts of data either on your own Hadoop cluster or in AWS using EMR. The mrjob sprint is targeted at both developers who are familiar with mrjob as well as new users who want to come up to speed on it. The sprints are...

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Yelp’s weekly “Learning Group” is one of our favorite engineering events. People come for the free food but stay for the hour-long presentation, usually given by a fellow engineer. Past topics, both technical and non-technical, have included everything from cinematography to typography to steganography, and the presentations are lovingly put together.  Since we’ve found these presentations fascinating we’ve decided to share them! This first one is a Learning Group about learning Chinese, by Mark W. He’s spent several years learning to speak Chinese, and in this presentation he introduces the Chinese language along with some tools and techniques for mastering...

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Two weekends ago, we participated in and sponsored the 2013 O4U (Out for Undergraduate Technology) Conferencein Palo Alto. This conference is hosted in different cities around the nation and strives to inspire lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender undergraduate students to be more involved in the tech industry. Students were able to spend some quality time with one of our engineers and recruiters and were also able to participate in panels, workshops and demos. Meetups SFHTML5  - Introduction to the Backbone.js, Ember.js, and AngularJS Frameworks   Sidney, Anthony and Miško brought in their expertise to tackle everyday questions about Backbone.js, Ember.js...

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Last year we published an article explaining the reasoning behind the birth of our mobile site, Mission: Mobile Makeover. Since then, we’ve been hard at work, dedicated to improving this new Yelp property and transform it into an app-like experience. Ideally? Forget about your browser, and keep on Yelpin’! Today, we’ll focus on some of the work we’ve accomplished during the past year or so. We’ll talk about two technical challenges faced lately: how to boost interaction speed on mobile, and how to make the most out of the screen sitting in your pocket. Boosting Interaction Speed Clicks are a...

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Our post today is by Will L., an engineering intern on one of Yelp’s backend teams this past fall. Will walks us through the challenges of bringing restaurant health inspection scores to Yelp, a feature we announced today at the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, DC. As you may have seen on our official blog, we are very excited about our initial release of the Local Inspection Value-Entry Specification (LIVES). LIVES is an open data standard crafted by Yelp in partnership with the cities of San Francisco and New York to allow municipalities to publish restaurant health inspection...

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