Blog

  • Bugs at Zoosk from the VIP point of view!

    Consider the following three simple facts. Continuous Improvement is good. People love it. It’s simply build, fail, and learn. And in order to learn faster, you have to build faster. But you might also fail faster—even faster than expected. Everybody is born with a passion for learning, and also a level of perfectionism. They will …Read More

  • Why You Should Pay Your Tech Debt

    It’s generally agreed in the programming community that regular refactors are a good thing, and that a company’s codebase should live with the smallest amount of tech debt possible. However, it isn’t always clear how these projects impact the overall business, since they usually aren’t customer-facing.In this article, I’ll be going over the different kinds …Read More

  • The Evolution of Our Analytic Platform: The Continued Marriage of Hadoop and OLAP

    Almost three years ago in 2012, I wrote about the marriage of Hadoop and OLAP at Zoosk, which frankly was like witnessing two people finding their soulmate. They both compliment each other perfectly, rounding out each other’s shortcomings, and highlighting each other’s strengths.  Sparks were flying everywhere!    And almost three years later, the marriage …Read More

  • CSS Issues Solved with Flexbox (No More Magic Numbers)

    The Flexbox layout provides a more efficient way to layout, align, and distribute space among items in a container, even when their size is unknown and/or dynamic. Below are some examples of difficult layout issues we encounter regularly and how easy it is to fix them using the power of Flexbox. 1. Media Unit Introduction: …Read More

  • Tuning Mobile Swipe to 60FPS: Part 2

    Several months ago, the Mobile Web team at Zoosk did a series of swipe optimization in our search slideshow. Some of the changes we made are discussed in another blog post by Robin Keller. Here I’d like to talk about another major optimization we made. That is to eliminate unnecessary repaints during the swipe animation by …Read More

  • Supercharge your API development with code generation

    At Zoosk Engineering, one of our biggest focuses is to make sure everything we do is as simple and as efficient as possible. This translates into everything from our code and tooling to our processes as well.  This means constantly experimenting with new ideas in an effort to improve in these areas. One of those experiments, which we permanently use …Read More

  • Tuning Mobile Swipe to 60FPS: Part 1

    Last year I wrote a blog post about creating a full-page mobile swipe experience with AngularJS. Mobile Zoosk was using my code for a long while, but as in all things, faster is always better. Earlier this year, I was tasked with returning to the project and increasing the average transition speed by 10%, which …Read More

  • QA: A Black Box?

    Ever interact with a Quality Assurance (QA) organization and feel like your teeth are getting pulled? That should never be the case. Communication is the key to resolving this matter. After I took over the reins of the QA automation team at Zoosk, I noticed there were two things that needed to be addressed: 1) …Read More

  • Zoosk Wearables

    The first time the Zoosk Android Team got our hands on an Android watch was at Google I/O 2014. As soon as we saw it in action, we started thinking about how we could extend the Zoosk Dating experience to Wearables. A little while ago during one of our hack days, a coworker and I …Read More

  • The Magic of Automated Testing at Zoosk

    When I came to Zoosk in September of 2013, I didn’t know much about automation testing and how helpful it could be. As far as I knew, Quality Assurance (QA) testing was done manually and programming skills were not involved. I soon discovered the impact that automated testing could have on the productivity of a …Read More