Introduction My name is Abrar Sheikh, and I’m a backend engineer on Yelp’s Distributed Systems team. Our team enables real-time data transfers between microservices and different data stores by building streaming infrastructure on top of Kafka using technologies like Python, Scala, and Apache Flink. I suffer from a genetic disorder called Albinism, which is mainly characterized by two things: Lack of pigmentation in the body, resulting in a white skin and hair tone. Severe loss of vision, which limits the ability to perform routine tasks such as driving, reading, or using computers. Growing up, I was fascinated by computers. Luckily...

Continue reading

Documentation is something that many of us in software and site reliability engineering struggle with – even if we recognize its importance, it can still be a struggle to write it consistently and to write it well. While we in Yelp’s Production Engineering group are no different, over the last few quarters we’ve engaged in a concerted effort to do something about it. One of the first steps towards changing this process was developing our documentation style guide, something that started out as a Hackathon project late last year. I spoke about it when I was giving my talk on...

Continue reading

Every day, we ship the Yelp experience to millions of users through our website and mobile apps. Our design team is committed to shaping the best interfaces to make Yelp easier to understand and more practical for users. Writing a review should be as simple as searching for a restaurant or reserving a table on Yelp. The Yelp experience must be consistent across all products and platforms where we ship our applications. For this reason, every app has to comply with our trusty Yelp style guide. This post will explain how we’ve built an Android library around our style guide...

Continue reading

At Yelp we pride ourselves on employee inclusiveness and building employee resource groups. We are excited to share with you the learnings of our first Awesome Women in Engineering (AWE) Summit in Europe, a one-day event on diversity and inclusion, leadership, and tech. We have two engineering offices in Europe, located in Hamburg and London. The AWE groups from both offices recently joined forces and co-organized the summit. The event was open to all Yelpers and the sessions were recorded so that we could share them with other Yelpers who weren’t able to attend. The summit opened up public speaking...

Continue reading

Round 10 Winners The tenth round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge ran throughout the second half of 2017 and we received many impressive, original, and fascinating submissions. As usual, we were struck by the quality of the entries: keep up the good work, folks! Today, we are proud to announce the grand prize winner of the $5,000 award: “Understanding Hidden Memories of Recurrent Neural Networks” by Yao Ming, Shaozu Cao, Ruixiang Zhang, Zhen Li, Yuanzhe Chen, Yangqiu Song, and Huamin Qu (from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). These authors developed a visual analytics method for understanding and...

Continue reading

Yelp hit a big milestone last week: ten years ago, Yelp launched on the Apple App Store! On July 10th, 2008, Apple officially launched what was then known as the iPhone App Store, giving iPhone users their first-ever opportunity to run third-party native apps on their devices. It launched with a whopping 552 apps available for download, including the Yelp app! At the time, Yelp was only available in the U.S. (we would launch in Canada a few weeks later), and offered an incredible breadth of functionality: you could search for businesses, read reviews, and even bookmark! Staggering. It’s not...

Continue reading

In our previous blog post, we made changes to the app that improved the initial rendering performance and scroll performance of the search results in the Yelp android app. In this blog post, we’ll cover how we monitor the performance of these changes and future changes to the app to ensure no performance regressions occur and undo all of our hard work! Step 3: Monitoring Performance Improvements Making changes that improve performance is great, but there’s no point in making these improvements if future changes by engineers could undo all the hard work you’ve done to get to this point....

Continue reading

We are always looking for new ways to bolster our security posture to keep our users and businesses safe. Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be open-sourcing our detect-secrets framework to prevent secrets from being committed to our codebase. This aligns well with our value to always Protect the Source and adds to our growing collection of secure-by-default frameworks which bolster web security without compromising employee productivity. The Problem Secrets in source code are points of weakness in an otherwise secure system because they are available to any and all repository contributors, cloned, copied and distributed. And each...

Continue reading