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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We host several external meetup groups every month, but sometimes, they want us to present, too! SF Hadoop Users invited Sudarshan Gaikaiwair, one of our Yelptastic engineers to speak about mrjob, our MapReduce framework. mrjob is an open source project that runs on top of Hadoop. While mrjob can also be used with your own hadoop cluster, it is great for getting started very quickly with Amazon’s EMR offering. mrjob allows programmers with very little Hadoop or EMR experience to quickly write scripts that can process terabytes of logs on hundreds of machines. This talk covers the basics of MapReduce...

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Want to know what widows, rivers, and pig bristles have to do with typography?  Listen to Carolina de Bartolo ( @carodebartolo) explain why Typography Matters in the video below!   Designers + Geeks is an engaging meetup that covers everything from beautiful architecture to mobile development.  At an event hosted at Yelp in November, Carolina covered topics ranging from the history of typography to practical advice on choosing fonts for your project. Designers + Geeks is just one of the many community events that we host in our spacious 10th floor lounge.  But fair warning: once you attend one event...

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Last month, Yelp was asked to talk about our experiences with Amazon’s Web Services at their re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.  I was delighted to be able to attend, speak, and learn from other speakers.   All videos from the conference have been published, and below I’ve highlighted the sections specifically about Yelp. Big Data with Elastic MapReduce The majority of our AWS usage is Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic MapReduce (EMR).  We use these technologies because we want every engineer to be extremely effective, to be able to command a cluster of machines that would normally take another...

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The mobile team at Yelp always strives to bring the best possible experience to your mobile device, but what does it take to accomplish this? For Yelp’s iOS app, in addition to tools used by many iOS developers — Xcode for a development environment, Git for version control — we have found other useful tools and libraries to improve our development experience. If you’ve ever appreciated our app and wondered what goes into its development, we’re happy to shed some light on what tools from the iOS development community we make use of, and we even have some of our...

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