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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Meet Julien R., Yelp systems engineer extraordinaire! When he isn’t keeping San Francisco green by biking to work or brewing his own beer at home, this well-rounded engineer keeps Yelp running day and night. So, totally not multi-talented at all. Julien recently took some time to share his favorite stories during his three plus years at Yelp. Check it out! What did you do before coming to Yelp? I studied electrical engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. During one of my summer vacations, I did an internship for a small network engineering company and got my CCNA. Once out of...

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As you may have seen on our Yelp Official Blog, we recently did a post on a new feature we are testing: Yelpy Insights. Here on the Engineering and Product Blog, we wanted to dive into the work our engineering team did to help discover and display Yelpy Insights. The Idea: Yelpy Insights was actually borne from feedback we had received from vegetarian yelpers (and in fact, some members of the engineering team!) that finding a good place to eat vegetarian food was tricky. For example, some things that are liked by vegetarians are also liked by omnivores, but some...

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Here at Yelp, we build some popular mobile apps. We have around 5 million monthly unique users and about 1/3 of all Yelp searches come from mobile. Our apps continue to grow in complexity as we add new features. We try our best to test before releases, however, sometimes UI breaks and we don’t notice. For example, in a recent release, we had the ‘Get Directions’ button disappear from our iPad app! [Screenshot] We finally noticed it missing when we got a report from a user. We were fairly embarrassed that we hadn’t caught the problem ourselves. This was a problem...

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As previously reported, we recently released a brand new mobile site, hand made with love for our more than 8 million users with mobile Webkit browsers who visited www.yelp.com from mobile devices in August. Surprisingly, there are a lot of challenges when creating a whole new, albeit mini, website (who would have thought?). If you were to look online for guidance on designing a mobile website, you would come across lots of articles that cover three main considerations: The once precise cursor is now your chubby, fumbling finger You have to present a lot of data on a wee-small screen...

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About a month ago, we launched m.yelp.com specifically targeting iPhone, Android, and WebKit-based smart phones. Our engineering team pushes code live on average three times a day. Moving fast means we need to have sound engineering practices internally — such as code reviews by peers and automated testing tools such as unit-tests and static analysis — to catch mistakes before they happen. In this blog post we will detail a misstep that we made and the response that followed. On the morning of October 27, 2011, we were alerted by a team of researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Boston University...

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