Here at Yelp, we enjoy a good brew. We also love our jobs as engineers! So for our recent Hackathon, it made perfect sense to build something that made drinking beer more…interactive. We call it KegMate. </embed> Being that you’ve found yourself on our Engineering blog, I bet you’re interested in how it works, eh? Theory of Operation (An Overview) Sensors attached to the keg feed data into an Arduino microcontroller, which in turn communicates directly with the iPad via a serial connection. The iPad processes that data and displays it in a snazzy manner along with a description of...

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For six years we’ve been hammering away on this little website of ours, feeding the needs of a steadily growing user-base with awesome features, freaky-good SEO and an elegant, performant architecture. What started out as a couple of guys in a room together is now nearly forty engineers developing a diverse set of systems that serve over 35 million unique visitors per month. We’ve come a long way in that time and covered a lot of ground — but our source control log still has blame lines from PayPal co-founder and initial Yelp investor Max Levchin, so it’d be hard...

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