Blog

  • Congratulations Hack Day Winners!

    We had a phenomenal Hack Day event, with 40 participants contributing 25 different ideas.  It took over 2 hours for us to present and demo everyone’s idea, even with a strict 5 minute time limit.  All the ideas were top-notch and you could tell that the teams really embraced this event.  We also had a …Read More

  • Zoosk R&D – A Retrospective

    Earlier this year, Zoosk decided to try something a little different with our hiring and onboarding process. Every year since I’ve been with Zoosk (3!) we have roughly doubled our headcount in Engineering.  And each year, that process has come with new challenges. How can we keep quality high? How can we keep an open …Read More

  • Smart wrapping: vs zero-width space

    One of my French colleagues came to me with a wrapping issue — “Montrez-vous” was breaking at the hyphen in Chrome, but not in Firefox.  The CSS hack would have been to make the font-size larger, so the browser broke the word at the right place…. but then a colleague alerted me to the <wbr> …Read More

  • Zoosk Hack Day, July 2012

    On July 26-27, our Product and Engineering teams will be conducting a Hack Day.  Similar to the event we held in September 2011, this will be a period of time for members of our product development organization to explore their own ideas to improve Zoosk.  Out of this, we hope to get some team building, …Read More

  • Searching Big Data with Solr

    Solr is extremely efficient at search. Not just keyword search but any kind of filtering criteria. Solr provides stable, time tested ways of scaling out. Whenever a Solr appliance is overwhelmed with traffic, the solution was always to add more servers. It was easy and it worked. Solr achieves good performance in searching large amounts …Read More

  • Zoosk Engineering in the News

    We published an article today on TechRepublic about our use of Google Closure as our front-end web development framework.  The article covers why we chose Google Closure and some of the benefits we have gained from it.  Check out the article:  Zoosk and Google Closure.  Also, look for upcoming posts about our evolving front-end technology …Read More

  • Selenium Conf 2012 – Reliably Automating a Moving Target

    Two weeks ago at Selenium Conference 2012 in London, I presented a talk on writing functional test automation across multiple platforms in a fast-paced and experimental development environment. The presentation is available on YouTube and the slides are available on the conference web site, but I thought I’d share some of the content here on …Read More

  • The Illusion of Completeness

    In the early days of the web, it was vital for web designers to ensure all the important content of a web page was “above the fold” as many web users at that time were unused to the concept of scrolling and so would often times never see content not immediately viewable within their initial …Read More

  • SXSW – Logistics Are Everything

    I had the benefit of attending this year’s SXSW Interactive event.  Rather than trying to summarize all the great talks, I thought I’d offer some practical advice for future SXSW attendees.  Even though I lived in Austin for 5 years, I had to learn some things the hard way to make the best of my …Read More

  • Better Performance with SASS & Compass

    SASS, or Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, is a framework for writing CSS in a more programmatic way.  Compass provides additional awesomeness in the form of CSS3 and grid mixins, as well as automatic spriting. We’ve been employing SASS & Compass in our new touch site that’s under development, and these tools are proving so useful that …Read More

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