Event Recap: Cookpad visits CoderSchool!

What’s the biggest project you’ve ever worked on? Engineers at Cookpad, a leading worldwide recipe site, support more than 85 million monthly active users (MAUs). Each engineer on their team is responsible for a million users — that’s a lot of scale! Cookpad took a quick stop on their tour of Vietnam to share their world-shaping experiences with a group of alumni, current students, passionate community members, and goi cuon aficionados.

With teams in Spain, Lebanon, Indonesia, and the U.S. in addition to their two offices in Japan, Cookpad has been aggressively expanding worldwide — they’ve also launched in Brasil, Germany, Thailand, U.K., and of course in the most delicious country on the planet: Vietnam! This international growth is very exciting for the company, but certainly comes with fascinating engineering challenges.

Mr. Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Cookpad International, talked about one of the most challenging problems in growing a team to support so many users: communication. Dealing with tens of thousands of concurrent users? Challenging, but perhaps less so than coordinating a team to successfully practice “hypothesis driven development”.

We believe that <this capability>

Will result in <this outcome>

We will know we have succeeded when
<clearly defined, measurable result>

Mr. Kentaro Takiguchi, Android Lead at Cookpad International, gave a deep talk into all the aspects of localization that Cookpad has run into by going global. On the engineering side, internationalization requires you to clearly separate localizable resources, but also sometimes expand to redesign layouts, such as when Cookpad expanded to right-to-left languages. For Arabic, Cookpad had to swap its layout and button positions and flip their iconic logo.

Localization also extends beyond engineering to touch all facets of the product. Kentaro shared Cookpad’s experiences with its Muslim audience celebrating Ramadan, dealing with new product usage spikes (based on time of day) and the types of recipes requested.

There were many questions from the audience, who were eager to learn more about the processes and technologies used to Cookpad. Questions ranged from “What database do you use for your user data?” (MySQL + Treasure Data) to “What do you think about incorporating video into your profiles?” (They’ve launched it in Japan, and the Yoshiori, the engineer responsible, was very happy to share his mouthwatering video detailing the preparation of pasta meat sauce.)

Cookpad is hiring all over the world, including Vietnam! If you’re interested, you can browse their available listings here: https://github.com/awesome-jobs/vietnam/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Cookpad.

Together, with world-class companies like Cookpad, CoderSchool hopes to build a bright future for Ruby in Vietnam. Một, hai, ba, dô to building a top-notch engineering ecosystem in Ho Chi Minh City!