Building a native design system for iOS
What is a “native design system”? “Native design system” can be broken up into two parts: “native” and “design system.” Starting with the latter, a design system is a collection of reusable...
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Targeted Code Coverage Reports for Android Continuous Builds
Automated testing is an important part of software development. Developers should always write tests for the code they produce. This not only ensures that their code is correct, but will also help...
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Our Transition to Machine Learning in Search Ranking to Match Customers and...
Thumbtack helps customers search for the right local professionals to get projects done. Our search product collects project details from customers and matches them against preferences from...
View ArticleDetecting Leaky View Controllers
For iOS developers, avoiding retain cycles is one of those things that is conceptually easy but can be deceptively subtle in practice. For the uninitiated, Swift manages memory by checking how many...
View ArticleThe 20 000 engineer view
I’m a new Thumbtack engineer, but I’m not new to engineering. I joined Thumbtack 4 months ago from a much larger tech company: one that has well over 20,000 engineers and a very strong engineering...
View ArticleOn transitioning to Android
I’ve been a Jill of just one trade for my entire career. Just one programming language, that is. I chose JavaScript — or, well — maybe it chose me. I have a certain attachment, like a child to their...
View ArticleHow we built an engineering job ladder from the ground up
When I joined Thumbtack four years ago, the team was 25 engineers, and was completely flat. No managers, job levels or titles – everyone was a “Software Engineer”. This worked well for a small...
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Moving forward on Android with GraphQL
As we keep growing at Thumbtack, we continue to invest in our infrastructure and developer experience. In order to move faster and in a more consistent manner across our customer and pro clients, our...
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Java is dead, long live Kotlin
When official Android support for Kotlin was announced on May 2017, I got really excited. Don’t get me wrong, I love Java: it was the first language I used professionally, and it has a very strong...
View ArticleI joined Thumbtack as a Data Scientist Two Months Ago and Here is Why
Data Science is often labeled as one of the sexiest jobs of the 21st century. But it is really hard to find the right sexy data science job. More and more companies are trying to collect tons of data...
View ArticleBlameless Incident Postmortems at Thumbtack
Over the 4 years I’ve been at Thumbtack, our engineering infrastructure has changed a lot. We’ve completely transitioned our cloud provider from SoftLayer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Google...
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A/B testing at Thumbtack
Thumbtack currently runs about 30 A/B tests per month, ranging in duration from a week to six months. We experiment on virtually every area of our product — customer signup, pro signup, matching...
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High availability for InfluxDB
Introduction At Thumbtack we use InfluxDB to store monitoring metrics collected from all of our systems. It currently handles the ingestion of more than 200,000 data points per second and with our...
View ArticleHitchhiker’s Guide to Code Reviews
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” — Harold Abelson Here at Thumbtack, we code review every change that we merge. Code reviews have a lot of...
View ArticleTroubleshooting Gunicorn and Gevent
At Thumbtack we run a few Python services via Gunicorn WSGI HTTP server. As those services are mostly I/O bound, gevent is a great choice for them. However, we have encountered a few issues with this...
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Visualizing 200K Moving Job Requests on Thumbtack in R
At Thumbtack, millions of customers each year, across the entire nation, seek the help of hundreds of thousands of service providers (“pros”) to get jobs done. Analysts and economists at Thumbtack can...
View ArticleStructured Engineering Hiring at Thumbtack
When I joined Thumbtack nearly three years ago, we had 25 engineers and were just beginning to scale the team (to nearly 140 engineers today!). Needless to say, we had to hire fast to scale. As we did,...
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Seedfinder – Infrastructure to Improve Sample Balance in Online A/B Tests
Authors: Lei Gong, Andrew Lam Thumbtack helps customers tackle their to-do list by connecting local professionals with the right customers all across the nation. Our teams are focused on building out...
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Scaling PostgreSQL: load balancing and healthchecks
Introduction Running PostgreSQL on a single primary master node is simple and convenient. There is a single source of truth, one instance to handle all reads and writes, one target for all clients to...
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Unleash Email Power with Composable, Language-agnostic, and Responsive Templates
By: Xin Liu, Giles Lavelle, Lucas Boyer, Tom Genoni Email is a crucial channel for us to connect customers and service professionals. When customers submit project requests with requirements such as...
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