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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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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