The Lego Block Exercise

What drove Foursquare to split into 2 apps

The Mathematics of Gamification

At Foursquare, we maintain a database of 60 million venues. And like the world it represents, our database is ever-changing, with users from all over the world submitting updates on everything from the hours of a restaurant to the address of a new barbershop. To maintain…

Introducing Pants: a build system for large-scale codebases like Foursquare’s.

Foursquare and Swarm are written predominantly in Scala on the server side. But as we’ve grown, so have the size, complexity and diversity of our codebase:

Exploring the Foursquare ‘Taste Map’

In order to deliver great personalized local recommendations, Foursquare needs to understand not only which places are the best, but also what makes places all over the world different from each other. Whether it’s a dive bar with great late night dancing or a…

Looking forward to Mongo 2.6: A deep dive into the new write commands

We’ve been longtime Mongo users at Foursquare and each new version has brought enhancements in performance, reliability, and features. Mongo 2.6 has a bunch of new features that we’re excited about, but I’m…

Announcing the first Foursquare API Demo Day!

Every couple of weeks we have an internal demo day — an hour where people demo things they’ve been working on to the rest of the company. Demos can be anything from a prototype app feature to a cool data visualization to a command-line tool. It’s a…