Blog

  • Exercises in Performance

    One of the things that we like to pride ourselves on here at Zoosk is the User Experience, and one key facet of that experience is performance. This is often assumed during the development cycle, but rarely is it explicitly called out as a “feature.” This was best put in a blog post on High Scalability, …Read More

  • Hack Day – April 2013

    On April 4-5th, the product and engineering teams conducted our third Hack Day event.  Similar to events we have held in the past, this was a period of time for members of our product development organization to explore their own ideas to improve Zoosk.  To make it interesting, we awarded cash prizes for the best …Read More

  • Crossing Industry Boundaries at GDC 2013

    The GDC( Game Developers Conference – http://www.gdconf.com ) has made its way to San Francisco once again this year and I’m glad to report that I had the opportunity to attend, sponsored by Zoosk. Why would Zoosk be interested in GDC you ask? At Zoosk, we make it a goal to get to know the …Read More

  • Zoosk R&D – The Second Term

    After a very successful first session of Zoosk R&D, we soon realized we were on to something and quickly began hiring for our next term.  If you’re not familiar with Zoosk R&D, it’s an engineering on-boarding program we started at Zoosk, which brings a team of new hires into the engineering organization to work together …Read More

  • Working in “Z” Years

    The New Year always provides a good time for reflection.  One thing that I am often asked by candidates during interviews is some form of the same question about working at Zoosk.  Usually, it’s something along the lines of “what makes Zoosk different from other companies you have worked for?”  In the past, I would …Read More

  • Marriage of Hadoop and OLAP: Best of both worlds to make sense of 200 Terabytes of data

    Like many other companies in the social networking world, Zoosk inherits a vast amount of data every day from user interactions, web logs, financial transactions, as well as standard business metric data.  Making sense of the data and turning it into actionable intelligence is of utmost importance to Zoosk, where we are constantly trying to …Read More

  • Agile Development Practices at Zoosk

    We use the agile development approach pretty extensively at Zoosk.  We aren’t committed to a specific flavor of agile, whether XP, Scrum, or any of the other variants.  For us, agile just reflects a set of values and behaviors that we try to follow as we build great software products.  Each product development organization is …Read More

  • Article in High Scalability about our Real Time Communications Infrastructure

    High Scalability published an article today about our Real Time Communications infrastructure.  The article provides a detailed explanation of the XMPP based systems at Zoosk which allow millions of our members to communicate with one another in real-time.  Types of communications include presence tracking, user event notifications and messaging.  This system has been built up …Read More

  • Women’s Javascript Study Group, sponsored by Zoosk

    There are lots and lots of women who code; but in any given room at any company, there are usually only a few of us…. So it’s nice to get together sometimes! Zoosk is sponsoring a Women’s Javascript Study Group run by two of us on the Zoosk UI Dev team (me & Kristin). It …Read More

  • Mobile Web Design: Use HTML5 to trigger the appropriate keyboard for form inputs

    Both iOs (iPhone / iPod / iPad) and Android devices offer specialized keyboards for entering different types of text input. Triggering the most appropriate keyboard for the type of input you want users to enter will greatly enhance their user experience. Types of Keyboards: Default: Alphabetic with toggle button to display full numeric keyboard Numeric: …Read More