Blog

  • Pseudotranslating Text in Your HTML Files

    Our Zoosk products support 27 languages, so as one can imagine, the variety of translated text lengths can impact the user interface. Consider the following text in four languages: Want more views? Get 75 Boost! ¿Quieres recibir más vistas? ¡Obtén 75 Destacados! Vous voulez plus de consultations ? Recevez 75 coups de boost ! Хотите …Read More

  • Self Service Deploys at Zoosk

    Once upon a time at Zoosk, the deploy process used to be a lengthy ritual that could only be performed by a select few. It required coordination and planning between multiple teams, and the developers had to wait in line for the “next deploy window” to monitor their code that was being shipped to production …Read More

  • Our first private cloud with OpenStack Kolla and CentOS Atomic

    At Zoosk, each developer is given access to a virtual machine with the entire Zoosk stack installed on it for development and testing. Historically, these VMs ran on a cluster of 10–15 individual hypervisors, each running CentOS 6. We managed the configuration both inside VMs and on the hypervisors using our production configuration management system, …Read More

  • Test Databases in Docker Containers

    Docker is an obvious choice for packaging stateless services—but what about databases?  We tried it out for packaging our test data sets. After a few lessons learned, the result is a nice win in developer efficiency. As you may have read in other posts on this blog, Zoosk is made up of a number of …Read More

  • Creating an Open Source Guild at Zoosk

    Open source software is computer software where the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. When you take a step back and think about it, it can seem strange that anyone would want to put significant effort into something and then release it for …Read More

  • Solving a Sticky Issue with a Sticky Element

    We recently added a new visual element to our subscription settings view in which a semi-transparent overlay covers the view when a user clicks on a button to either reactivate a subscription or an upgrade option. This prevents the user from taking a different action in the view while the reactivation is processing. Aside from …Read More

  • Functional Teams or Feature Teams?

    As Zoosk Engineering has grown throughout the years, we’ve aligned our teams in different ways based on the needs and challenges that our organization was facing at that time. One of our core values is to continually challenge the status quo by always looking for ways do our work better and faster by encouraging calculated …Read More

  • From Monolith to Micro-Services

    Six years ago, Zoosk was a web and desktop application built with a monolithic architecture. Today, the Zoosk franchise runs on multiple platforms (Android, iOS, web, and touch) with a public facing API gateway and 17 micro-services in a hybrid data center / cloud environment. This blog summarizes the Zoosk engineering history of, and lessons …Read More

  • Easy Developer Environments With ZENv

    A while back, I wrote a tool called ZENv that’s used to keep Zoosk’s developer environment useful and up to date. Since then, it’s helped immensely in keeping things productive and minimizing the amount of hair-pulling that I’ve had to do. It’s recently been open sourced, so I thought I’d tell a little story about …Read More

  • Zoosk’s DC Migration

    Last week, Zoosk’s operations team said goodbye to the data center that has been our home for the past seven or so years. This migration was the product of months of planning that culminated with a rather tense hour of down time as we moved to our new home. Not everything went according to plan, …Read More

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