I interned at Yelp during summer 2015. Here’s what I did:
Activity Feed
The Activity Feed shows photos, reviews, tips, and other content from friends and nearby Yelp users. I implemented several new activity types, including the event attendance feed item.
I also made a wide variety of other feed-related changes, such as
- redesigning the user profile view on the More menu,
- adding animations to make switching feeds less jarring, and
- adding new ways to interact with existing feed items.
The feed is now available on the App Store! It launched on 13 August 2015 with the release of Yelp version 10.0 for iOS. (I’ll keep updating this page as more features get rolled out publicly.)
New User Profiles & Following
I implemented the ability to follow other users from within the iOS app. This was an end-to-end project: it involved creating UI components, building a UI, sending network requests, and of course, tests.
Here’s the before and after:
The first flat-style buttons in the Yelp app!
Finding Bugs
Contributed to overall software quality by reporting 60+ bugs in production code and many others while doing code reviews. These were a grab bag of incorrect edge case behavior, crashes, security problems, and UI bugs.
On my team, I was most known for finding countless tiny UI inconsistencies. The kind stuff that is aggravating to designers and forgettable to most other people: blurry lines and assets, misalignment, incorrect colors. One of these even turned out to be a UIKit bug in iOS 8.
Using xScope guides to obsess over misaligned assets on the middle tab bar button.
Yelp Café App
Yelp Café is our in-house coffee shop. For the company hackathon, Paul M, Dylan W, and I built an ordering app for it.
We made our UI presentation code follow the MVVM pattern, allowing us to apply what we’d picked up during the internship. MVVM also makes the app very straightforward for maintainers to extend (this may be needed if the baristas add new drinks to the menu).
Customer Testimonials
SOOOOO COOL —Pujun B, Engineering Intern
NOW ALL I NEED IS AN UBER SERVICE FOR BRINGING THE COFFEE TO MY DESK. MAKE SURE YOU GIVE YOUR EMPLOYEES BENEFITS. oops my capslock —Bryce A, Software Engineer
This changes everything. —Eli A, Recruiter
Couple little bugs: […] “No milk latte” isn’t really a thing. —Alex L, Engineering Director
“No milk latte” sounds like a new drink Starbucks would introduce. —Andrew M, Product Manager