Alex joined Thumbtack three and half years ago as a new grad backend engineer on the Trust and Safety team and moved to the Targeting team as an Android engineer two years ago. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is usually based in San Francisco, but…

Michelle joined Thumbtack three and a half years ago as a frontend engineer before stepping into an Engineering Manager role last year. She grew up in Austin, TX, was a long-time resident of the Bay Area, and just recently moved down to LA thanks to Thumbtack’s remote work policy. Outside…

Neha is an Engineering Director at Thumbtack. She has been a central part of our team for more than 5 years. Prior to joining Thumbtack, Neha spent time at Thomson Reuters, Model N, and Google — where she worked for more than 6 years. Read on to learn what Neha…

By: Kevin Beaulieu — 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 components, tokens, and other design standards that can be used by both designers, to guide their work, and software engineers, to speed up the…

By: Brian Terczynski — 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 catch any future regressions as the codebase evolves. Unfortunately, developers do not always do a good job of…

By: Mark Andrew Yao — 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 professionals. Afterwards, our ranking algorithm displays the professionals most likely to result in a job well done. We tackle the search ranking problem…

By: Scott Southerland — 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 objects reference a given variable. When all references to an object are removed, the object can be deallocated…

By: Will Mee — 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 culture, one whose services you likely use daily. Thumbtack’s got a strong engineering base too…

By: Bianca Gandolfo 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 favorite toy. Is it real or is it…