Yik Yak Engineering

Yik Yak Feed System Architecture (Golang)

Background

At its core, Yik Yak is a service where users can create posts at their location and ask “What are people saying near me”? It’s the responsibility of the Feed Service to answer that question and return a set of content…

Migration to Google Cloud Platform — New Geostore

Yik Yak’s primary use case is to quickly return the most recent N messages posted, relative to a user’s current location, as bounded by either a circle of arbitrary radius or an arbitrary polygon. In this post we discuss how we built a geostore…

Migration to Google Cloud Platform — Overview

In this post we will give an overview of the migration of our platform from AWS to GCP as well as the new systems which were built to support it. Subsequent posts will drill down into some of these new systems.

Three Golden Testing Patterns in Go

Background

At Yik Yak we built an entirely new stack in Go quickly. It was here that I wrote my first line of Go and was introduced to several testing patterns new to me, including table-drive tests and generated goldens which I really…

Test it Now or Regret It Later…

In this blog post we will talk about testing. I know, Real Engineers can prove that their code is…

Yik Yak Configuration and Experiment System

In this article we’ll discuss the Yik Yak client and backend configuration and experiment system. This is part of a series intended to describe the system components we built to implement Yik Yak and share what worked well and what didn’t. By sharing our…