Love Python but can’t make it all the way to Montreal for PyCon this year? Never fear, Yelp is hosting a sneak peak of many of the talks! Instead of buying plane tickets, a hotel room, and a conference pass, you can kick back, drink beer, and have pizza with us! Next week’s Python meetups, both PyLadies and SF Python, will be hosting practice talks for the conference. Let’s dive into two of the talks: a novice session on machine learning, and an intermediate talk on working with external languages. At a high level, Melanie Warrick will get us started...

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JR Heard has many big projects under his belt, and this week we’ll get to learn about one of the most recent. Yelp pushes new code almost every day, so it’s no surprise we get new features every week. But how do we make sure they’re working as intended? JR describes one element of our solution below! Let’s talk about features. Building new features is super fun. Improving pre-existing ones is fantastic, too. What would be less fantastic would be if the your new feature turned out to crumble under production load, or if your untested-gut-feeling improvement to an old...

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The Challenge The second round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge opened in May 2013, giving students access to our massive Phoenix Academic Dataset, with reviews and businesses from the greater Phoenix metro area. The Yelp team is very excited to provide the academic community with a rich dataset over which to train and extend their models and research. We encourage students to take advantage of this wealth of data to develop and extend their own research in data analysis and machine learning. Students who submit their research are eligible for cash awards and incentives for publishing and presenting their findings....

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We’re excited to publicly share Yelp’s styleguide — a living document that we’ve used internally since May 2013 to create visual consistency across Yelp and reduce technical debt with modular, reusable markup and styles. To get this project off the ground, our front-end and design teams worked together more closely than ever before. We’re very pleased to be able to share it with anyone interested in hearing how we moved to a fast-paced UI design and development model. This kind of design and development requires a lot of discipline across product and engineering teams. “There are no special cases” has...

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It’s a big month for awesome events at Yelp HQ!  Of special interest to those wondering how Yelp uses Hadoop is the Hadoop User Group on the 19th.  I’ll be presenting on where Hadoop fits into our Big Data stack.  Unfortunately, Hadoop isn’t quite pixie dust you can sprinkle on data and transmorph it into insights.  To get the most of the system, we’re careful what we feed in, how we schedule jobs, and what we do with the results.  Please RSVP to join me for a great discussion! Other meetups this month include the always diverse and interesting Designers...

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The desktop 3D printing evolution has taken the world by storm. For me, it all started a little over two years ago when Yelp bought its engineers a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer to play around with. The sounds and smells that accommodate desktop 3D printing have since become second nature to our corner of the office. While we haven’t yet found a way for 3D printing to help our users connect with great local businesses, it has been a great driver of innovation and fun in our engineering team. What started out as a few engineers printing toys has since...

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This summer, our interns spent their weekdays in downtown San Francisco alongside full-time engineers developing some of Yelp’s latest releases: mobile reviews, Yelp’s launch in Brazil, and others still in the works. Mark M. and Olivia G., interns from our mobile and community teams, shared a little about their projects. Though rivals on their college campuses, our Cal and Stanford interns put aside their differences to engineer some really neat stuff. Mark M. (Mobile Team - UC Berkeley) “I spent the summer creating an entirely new framework built around data analytics. My tool allows us to visualize and analyze critical...

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On Wednesday, November 20, Yelp opened up the doors of our new space and invited tech industry friends to come by and see what we’re up to. Scott Clark and John B., two of our engineers, gave presentations about current technology challenges we’re working on here at Yelp. Search Engineering Manager Chris T. gives us a play-by-play below! The crowd started arriving at our new building in San Francisco even before the official start time of 6pm. I ended up chatting with some folks in front of the building and did not get up to the party on the 8th...

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