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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One of Yelp’s core values is “play well with others.”  So it’s no surprise that Yelp thrives with open source projects written by others, and gives back by sharing projects of our own.  That’s why I’m excited to share this post by the manager of our Infrastructure team, Oliver N. (or as he’s known around the office, “BigO”), which adds to our library of open source projects. How do you know if your website slows down as a result of a code push?  How do you keep tabs on the performance of your most important endpoints?  How do you know...

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Our next post comes from Mason G., superstar intern on our IOS team.  While not assembling a  20-monitor wide version of Mario that displays the entire level at once, Mason has been cranking out features for our shiny iPhone and iPad apps.  Yelp thrives on data, so it is no suprise that one of Mason’s projects was to evaluate the technologies we use for pinpointing users’ geolocation.  Read on to get the full scoop! “Checking in” to a business using Yelp’s mobile applications is a fun way for Yelpers to engage with businesses and others in the Yelp community, but we...

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This post comes to us from Sean, one of our Data Mining interns and a student at the University of Pittsburgh. Sean wrote production code his first week here, and hasn’t slowed down since. I’m happy to see his main project released today: it’s called EMRio (pronounced like the  Italian plumber). Yelp has already started using EMRio to start saving money on our Elastic MapReduce bills. Take it away, Sean! At Yelp, we like to use MapReduce a lot. We use it so much, in fact, that we made mrjob, a tool that allows easy creation of mapreduce jobs in...

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One of the qualities Yelp looks for in engineers is a passion for making sense of “big data.”  But as a student or newbie in the field of data science, how are you supposed to demonstrate that passion? Enter the Yelp Academic Dataset, a snapshot of review, user, and business data from the communities around 30 universities.  Last semester, I had a chance to see some of the amazing things that UC Berkeley students could do with the dataset. Visualizing Data Unfortunately, the raw dataset is only exciting to those who can skim JSON serialized datastructures (OK, OK, I admit...

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If you could have any superpower, what would it be? (You can’t say the power to get more powers.) If you’re like me, it’d be the power to fly. Unfortunately, I’m not a Superman, Neo, nor a bird. I’m a software engineer at Yelp; I make things happen by writing code. So I started to write code that tricks me into feeling like I’m flying. What I ended up with was a Mac app that allows you to control a quadcopter by flapping your arms like wings. To do this I used the Microsoft Kinect, a Parrot ARDrone quadcopter, OpenNI,...

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It’s that time of year again: when Yelp engineers huddle for 48 hours to dream up and build some trippy stuff – and Yelp Hack@thon 7 proved no different! There was everything from custom Magic: The Gathering cards personalized for Yelp, our own version of Hungry, Hungry Hippos with (you guessed it) Hungry, Hungry Yelpers made in HTML5 to LOLPython on Monorails that featured LOLcode instead of Python (with some funny web framework to go along with it!). That Magic: The Gathering card look familiar, Jeremy?   In past years, we’ve provided a deeper look into some of the projects...

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