As various teams at Yelp were focused on developing features to help businesses adapt to COVID-19, some teams were looking ahead and developing features that would help businesses in the later stages or after the pandemic. The Challenge Early on in the pandemic, we saw some businesses pause advertising on Yelp as government regulations required many businesses temporarily close or limit their operations. However, businesses quickly adjusted to the local regulations, while implementing health and safety precautions to keep their staff and customers safe. Through this adjustment we wanted to ensure it was easy to restart advertising right where they...

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Everyone loves graphs going up and to the right, unless they reflect your page load timings. This blog post is about curtailing higher page load times. Yelp for Business Owners allows business owners to manage their listing, respond to reviews, edit their business information, upload business photos, and more. Business owners can also purchase Yelp Ads and profile products to target local audiences and enhance their business’s presence on Yelp. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the ways we improved the UX performance of our ads purchase flow by dramatically reducing the load times. You’ll be able to apply...

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Improving Code Ownership at Yelp In this prior blog post, Kent talked about how the Engineering Effectiveness (EE) organization was created at Yelp to reduce communication complexity between core teams and product teams. Core teams need to communicate infrastructure changes, manage the deprecation of libraries and tools, and evangelize new tooling to other teams at a regular cadence. EE has been investing in building tools that can communicate these changes and provide insights into what might make product teams more effective in shipping code quickly and safely. In order to measure the engineering effectiveness of Yelp, we need to measure...

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Many machine learning (ML) practitioners use partial dependence plots (PDP) to gain insights into model behaviors. But have you run into situations where PDPs average two groups with different behaviors and produce curves applicable to none? Are you longing for tools that help you understand detailed model behavior in a visually manageable way? Look no further! We are thrilled to share with you our newest model interpretation tools: the Nearby Individual Conditional Expectation plot and its companion, the Partial Dependence at Quantiles plot. They highlight local behaviors and hint at how much we may trust such readings. A not NICE...

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This post is about how Yelp is transitioning from the management of Cassandra clusters in EC2 to orchestrating the same clusters in production on Kubernetes. We will start by discussing the EC2-based deployment we have used for the past few years, followed by an introduction to the Cassandra operator, its responsibilities, the core reconciliation workflow of the operator, and finally, the etcd locking we employ for cross-region coordination. Cassandra is a distributed wide-column NoSQL datastore and is used at Yelp for both primary and derived data. Yelp’s infrastructure for Cassandra has been deployed on AWS EC2 and ASG (Autoscaling Group)...

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Engineers on Yelp’s Consumer Growth team work closely with product managers, data scientists, and designers to increase user acquisition, engagement and retention to fuel the rest of the business. The team is central to growing the number of active users on the Yelp platform. In-App Update, introduced in Android Pie, is a feature that allows Android users to update the app by showing a prompt while they’re using the app and keeps users in the app as the update is happening in the background. We thought it would be a valuable feature for consumers on Yelp and began researching and...

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The relational database of choice at Yelp is MySQL and it powers much of the Yelp app and yelp.com. MySQL does not include a native high-availability solution for the replacement of a primary server, which is a single point of failure. This is a tradeoff of its dedication to ensuring consistency. Replacing a primary server is sometimes necessary due to planned or unplanned events, like an operating system upgrade, a database crash or hardware failure. This requires pausing data modifications to the database while the server is restarted or replaced and can mean minutes of downtime. Pausing data modifications means...

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Jupyter notebooks are a key tool that powers Yelp data. It allows us to do ad hoc development interactively and analyze data with visualization support. As a result, we rely on Jupyter to build models, create features, run Spark jobs for big data analysis, etc. Since notebooks play a crucial role in our business processes, it is really important for us to ensure the notebook output is reproducible. In this blog post, we’ll introduce our notebook archive and sharing service called Folium and its key integrations with our Jupyterhub that enable notebook reproducibility and improve ML engineering developer velocity. Folium...

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