Blog

  • Evolution of the Photo System at Zoosk

    Because Zoosk is a dating website, photos are an integral part of our users’ experiences. Having a good profile photo helps Zoosk’s users make good first impressions. This is why we are continuously trying to identify better ways for users to upload, edit, and maintain their photo galleries. A user’s photo gallery consists of information …Read More

  • The Incredibly Obvious Secret: Finding (and Fixing) Product Bugs Through a Close Relationship Between Test and Customer Support

    Suppose you find a bug in a website you use frequently. What do you do? For most websites, the only option is to call customer support and tell them about the issue. But what happens then? Will anyone other than the person you spoke to ever hear that the problem exists? Will they prioritize the …Read More

  • How IE 9 and below calculate the 4,095 CSS limit

    At Zoosk we push for a feature-rich experience for our users and explore new technologies for our development. At the same time we support audiences using legacy means to access our products. One of the challenges of expanding our services, and as a result our codebase, is avoiding the Internet Explorer 4,095 CSS limit. This …Read More

  • Improving performance at Zoosk – RUM Monitoring vs. Synthetic Monitoring

    At Zoosk, one of the bedrocks of our engineering culture is a strong focus on continuous improvement in all facets of our work. For the client teams, part of that means continuously looking for ways to improve the performance and responsiveness of our client applications for our end users. Towards the beginning of this year, …Read More

  • Zoosk Test Tool “Test2k”

    Using production data in a preproduction environment. There are many challenges presented in testing a service with millions of users. No matter how many scenarios our team can envision and test, our users will inevitably find paths and situations we haven’t anticipated. These challenges are enhanced in an engineering environment that ships as quickly as …Read More

  • Responsive Web Design vs. Adaptive Web Design… Which one is for me?

    The answer is… both! There seems to still be some confusion throughout the industry that Responsive Web Design and Adaptive Web Design are mutually exclusive. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Aaron Gustafason does a pretty good job explaining the differences on his blog, but to summarize, Adaptive Web Design embodies the …Read More

  • Creating Full-Page Mobile Swipe with AngularJS

    Every website wants to have a flashy front page. It increases user interaction, raises revenue, and adds the all-important awesome factor to your site. For Zoosk, this means giving users the ability to swipe between search results, just like in a native app. But making one isn’t always the simplest task. As part of a …Read More

  • My Trip to ConvergeSE

    At the beginning of May I attended the ConvergeSE Conference in South Carolina. I chose this conference because of it’s amazing speaker lineup and it did not disappoint. With responsive web design being the new standard, it was nice to attend a conference that gave me a new perspective on the subject. Workshops were held …Read More

  • Email Best Practices for UI Developers

    This guide was created after attending Fabio Carneiro’s talk on Hard Won Lessons in Responsive Email Design at the ConvergeSE Conference in South Carolina. Read more about the conference. Reset Images Some clients will render images with an ugly border by default. All images need to have these styles for reset puposes: img {border: 0; …Read More

  • Name Mangling and Serialization in PHP

    Serialization in PHP is the process of taking a snapshot of the state of an object and converting it to a storable string to be reconstructed later. It is a powerful tool, however there are a few pitfalls to be aware of that can cause issues if you’re not careful. In order for a serialized …Read More