Foursquare Engineering

These are some of the top sites' engineering blogs which I collected over a period of time - I removed those which have already been posted:

Google: http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/ http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/ http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/

YouTube: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/

Baidu: http://usa.baidu.com/category/baidutechblog/

Yahoo: http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/ http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/

Wikipedia (closest I could find): https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/

Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/

Twitter: https://engineering.twitter.com/

eBay: http://www.ebaytechblog.com/

Microsoft: http://microsoftengineering.com

FourSquare: http://engineering.foursquare.com/

Apple (closest): https://developer.apple.com/

Paypal: https://www.paypal-engineering.com/ https://devblog.paypal.com/

Dropbox: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/

Edit: More (collected from this link: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-startup-engineering-blogs):

Yelp: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/

Quora: http://engineering.quora.com/

Yammer: http://eng.yammer.com/blog/

AirBnB: http://nerds.airbnb.com/

Square: https://corner.squareup.com/

Flickr: http://code.flickr.net/

Soundcloud: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/

Cloudera: http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/

Slideshare: http://engineering.slideshare.net/

Heroku: http://engineering.heroku.com/

Pinterest: http://engineering.pinterest.com/

Foursquare (https://foursquare.com/jobs)| New York, NY and San Francisco, CA | ONSITE only

We make the Foursquare and Swarm apps. Foursquare is a place recommendation engine with worldwide coverage. Swarm is an app for checking in to places you go to share with friends, life log, get perks and win prizes, or just for quirky fun.

Built on the foundation of our apps, we also have suite of location intelligence products. Our venue database powers products by Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Samsung, Twitter and more.

We're hiring for a variety of positions in NYC and SF:

- Infrastructure Engineers - distributed systems in Scala and Go

- Ad Tech Engineers - real time bidding at 100k QPS. Ad effectiveness measurement based on Foursquare/Swarm place visits

- Android/iOS Engineers - Foursquare and Swarm apps

In the news lately:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/foursquare-10-puts-search-front-and-center/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/marvel-dc-real-difference-between-933657

https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/how-the-trump-presidential-campaign-is-affecting-trump-businesses-c343178e3c03#.wxq6t8ija

https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/uber-taps-foursquares-places-data-so-you-never-have-to-type-an-address-again/

More job details and application form here: https://foursquare.com/jobs

Interview process for most roles is recruiter phone convo, take home test, on-site. Read more here:…

More like throwing some wood into the fire. Was instigated by the talk[1] "Solr Power FTW", and "Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style" [6] (where Justin Moore admits: We are dumping the data from Mongo and loading it into Hadoop over S3 files. Map reduce is in this system, not in our mongo databases. ).

Was wondering how much has this evolved over the last 6 months, how viable machine learning algorithms are appliable and clusterable over NOSQL databases, and which ones can do this without dumping the entire database.

I had some links talking about it:

Full text search with MongoDB[2]

Ask HN: What's the best way to handle full-text search with MongoDB?[3]

AskHN: NoSQL with full text search - which is better CouchDB or MongoDB?[4]

Is MongoDB a valid alternative to relational db + lucene?[5]

[1] http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7455

[2] http://hmarr.com/2010/mar/18/full-text-search-with-mongodb/

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069271

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1984666

[5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2546494/is-mongodb-a-valid-alternative-to-relational-db-lucene

[6] http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/

I think it's important when interviewing candidates that he/she can demonstrate fundamental CS knowledge. In any software project, you may be working out very complicated features, and CS knowledge is often the common language for conveying complex and subtle ideas.

That said, it's perverse that there's a cottage industry around software engineering interview training on both sides of the table for the crazy questions that are being asked. No one wants this, but sadly, once you're in the door at these places that do these sorts of interviews, the motivation to affect change approaches zero.

There are some companies that have tried to make this a fairer assessment though, e.g. Foursquare http://engineering.foursquare.com/2016/04/04/improving-our-e.... Putting this sort of effort into an interview process is time-consuming, but if the software industry is going to make its interview practices assess candidates more fairly, it's going to take effort.

I've been meaning to put together a more technical blog post about the various geo pieces that we've released at foursquare. But for now, here's one that's an overview of the things we've been working on: http://engineering.foursquare.com/2013/06/11/quattroshapes-a-global-polygon-gazetteer-from-foursquare/

The biggest piece is http://twofishes.net/, our coarse (city/neighborhood level) geocoder based on geonames data. It also serves as our coarse reverse geocoder when we combine it with polygon data, which we've released at http://quattroshapes.com/, as a combination of open government data and synthesized data.

http://zetashapes.com/ is a side project of ours, where we're seeing if people want to draw their own crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries in US by coloring in a map of basically city blocks.

I'm always eager to chat about open geodata as well as complimentary commercial solutions.

Here is the actual blog post from today announcing a bunch of Pants milestones: http://pantsbuild.github.io/announce_201409.html

This is actually a collaborative project between Twitter, Foursquare & Square. All three companies contributed a ton of work.

Here's the announcement on the Foursquare Eng Blog: http://engineering.foursquare.com/2014/09/16/introducing-pants-a-build-system-for-large-scale-codebases-like-foursquares/

And here's the one on the Square Eng blog: http://corner.squareup.com/2014/09/trying-on-pants.html

It's a fully open source project so we'd welcome contributions (or jokes) from any and all interested folks! Pants is a great build tool that we hope to grow and use for years to come.