Last month, we held our first Awesome Women in Engineering (AWE) Summit at our headquarters in San Francisco. AWE’s mission is to build a strong community for women and allies in our engineering and product departments by facilitating professional career-building activities, leadership, and mentorship opportunities. As a resource group, we provide support and organize activities targeted towards professional growth for women, helping them to maximize their potential at Yelp and beyond. The summit was an internal, half-day event for women and allies in engineering and product at Yelp. We had previously hosted a summit for our EU offices, but this...

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Finding that first job in the tech industry can be a daunting task. You might not get a response to your application, or maybe you’ll move forward with the interview, but it doesn’t pan out in the end. You might wonder, “How are other people successful at getting offers? What do others do differently? What’s the secret to getting through this arduous process?” The answer is pretty simple: lots of practice. While there’s never a guarantee of getting an offer, following these recommendations can increase your chances of successfully going through the interview process and potentially landing your dream job!...

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The ability to quickly serve search results is essential for Yelp. Ranking performance has a significant impact on the time it takes to process a search request, and it’s crucial for fast ranking that we can quickly look up the data that’s fed into our machine learning models. Per-document map-like data is especially challenging in this regard, as traditional approaches often read and decode the full map only to look up a single value within that map later on. MapType is a custom Elasticsearch datatype that provides an optimized look-up approach for such data. Let’s start by discussing a concrete...

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In an ongoing effort to break down our monolithic applications into microservices here at Yelp, we’ve migrated several business flows to modern architecture using AWS Step Functions. Transactional ordering at Yelp covers a wide variety of verticals, including food (delivery/takeout orders), booking, home services, and many more. These orders are processed via Step Functions, where each is represented as an execution instance of the workflow, as shown below. Figure 1: Illustrative Step Functions Workflow for Transactions Orders Each step in the above workflow is an “activity,” and Yelp implements these activities as batch daemons, which interact with AWS Step Functions...

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Today we’re proud to introduce Bento, an open source framework for building modularized Android user interfaces, created here at Yelp. Over the past year, we’ve seen great developer productivity gains and product design flexibility from using Bento on our most critical screens. In this post we’ll explain a bit about how Bento works, why you might want to use it, and where we want to go next. What is Bento? We named this framework after the wonderfully compartmentalized Japanese lunch container. A Bento box is a container with dividers to separate different food items from each other. If you squint...

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In 2017, Yelp had over 40 Jira administrators to allow different teams across the organization to perform administrative tasks. With lots of admins came lots of changes, which lead to our Jira environment accumulating hundreds of orphaned workflows, screens, and schemes. To solve this problem, we built a scalable solution that empowers our engineers to create Jira projects themselves using code and source control – ensuring 100% standardization across all engineering projects and making Jira easier to manage, simpler to use, and better performing. This blog post will cover Yelp's use of Ansible to manage Jira server project creation, updates,...

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This year Yelp sponsored the second annual Tech Intersections conference in Oakland, CA. It was a great opportunity to celebrate womxn of color in tech and to come together and learn from each other’s successes, challenges, and experiences. The conference, which featured ALL womxn speakers and attendees, highlighted topics ranging from tech entrepreneurship to self-care and career skills. Kelly Greenia, Engineering Recruiter, with some Yelp Swag! Two members of Yelp’s Awesome Women in Engineering (AWE) group attended the conference and below are some of their takeaways. This past weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Tech Intersections conference at...

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Here at Yelp, we host a lot of servers in the cloud. In order to make our website more reliable—yet cost-efficient during periods of low utilization—we need to be able to autoscale clusters based on usage metrics. There are quite a few existing technologies for this purpose, but none of them really meet our needs of autoscaling extremely diverse workloads (microservices, machine learning jobs, etc.) at Yelp’s scale. In this post, we’ll describe our new in-house autoscaler called Clusterman (the “Cluster Manager”) and its magical ability to unify autoscaling resource requests for diverse workloads. We’ll also describe the Clusterman simulator,...

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