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Hackday 5.0 - our review
Powered by lightning fast internet, lasagne and tons of Club Mate, our 5th Hackday was a success! So, here we are with our own review about a day full of projects, sun - and caffeine.This year’s...
View ArticleHow I got the job I wanted (even though I wasn’t qualified)
At Babbel, we’re constantly looking for new and unconventional ways to get our customers over the hurdle of speaking in a foreign language. As a result, finding talented people to help move our...
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Hackday 6.0 - our review
Lots of ideas, people, Club Mate and pizzas. Hello again, with our own review after a successful Hackday.The 6th Hackday was held at Magazine in der Heeresbäckerei, an impressive industrial monument...
View ArticleAndroid Modular Project - Organizing your library dependencies
As your project grows you might have found the need to split it into several modules. This becomes even more prominent when you’re working in a company where several teams develop the same app, but...
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On the Road to Gender Parity
Jana Rekittke from the Engineering gave us a recap of the EWIT16* conference she attended, presenting some topics and ideas. Enjoy reading the summary of her talk!Tech workplaces tend to be often...
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Introduction to Test Automation
At Babbel, we revised our test automation strategy about 1.5 years ago. Since then, our focus has been on frontend testing (browser and mobile) for crucial parts of our business. Which, in our case, is...
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WTM Berlin Android Study Jam at Babbel
Do you want to learn how to create you own Android app, but you don’t have any developing experience? What about joining your local Android Study Jam?A study Jam is a community-run study group. Members...
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Improving the Performance of Complex Angular Applications
At Babbel our learning content is maintained and created using a custom-made content authoring system based on Angular 1.x. The application has become quite complex by now, counting about 80 custom...
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Launch an AWS EMR cluster with Pyspark and Jupyter Notebook inside a VPC
When your data becomes massive and data analysts are eager to construct complex models it might be a good time to boost processing power by using clusters in the cloud … and let their geek flag fly....
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7th Hackday Review
Wouldn’t it be better, make you stronger, to have your soul in more pieces, I mean, for instance, isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number, wouldn’t seven — ?” (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood...
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Innovation in Language Learning @ Babbel
Although handcrafted content from our language experts lies at the heart and soul of our offering, Babbel is constantly looking at ways to enhance the experience of our users through cutting-edge...
View ArticleWhat is dependency injection after all?
Are you starting your developer career and came across tools like Dagger, Guice and Roboguice and got a bit confused? Is it hard to grasp the concepts of dependency injection and inversion of control?...
View ArticleBoost your engineering career with us! Join Babbel Neos!
Hi! I’m Gábor. I want to tell you about an exciting new training program I’m running at Babbel, Berlin for aspiring software engineers. It’s called Babbel Neos. But first, a bit about how I ended up in...
View ArticleWhy Babbel's Developers Make A Difference
Babbel is all about empowering people to learn languages — to better communicate and have conversations all over the globe. We are passionate about our purpose, and we want to find developers who care...
View ArticleNaming Colour Variants
One of the difficult things in the field of software development is naming variables as meaningful as possible. A good variable name is not only important for clean code but also to facilitate the...
View ArticleI've trusted you! You promised no null pointer exceptions!
So you’ve just switched to Kotlin and thought it would be great to have all your API entities written using data classes with proper nullability rules. You’ve set up your Gson objects and prepare to...
View ArticleReact Amsterdam Conference Highlights
Davide Ramaglietta and Alexander Gudulin from R2D2 team of the Learning Engineering Area attended the biggest React conference in the world with 1200+ attendees. Here is their impressions on the event...
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If you need monitoring, just shout!
AWS provides a lot of low-level monitoring for Lambda functions out-of-the-box: invocations, duration, errors, throttles — you name it. But if you want to monitor aspects of your business domain in...
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Why and how to choose reference user stories
For many agile software engineering teams, it is common practice to estimate the complexity of the user stories that they will be working on. Estimation is not an exact science and so they choose...
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Hackday memories
A perfect blue sky. Warm sunshine. People wearing T-shirts and sunglasses. And yet, the orange and red leaves covering Berlin’s streets announce the cold season arriving soon. As we watch the leaves...
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Spelling correction with Levenshtein distance
How similar are the words ‘hear’ and ‘here’?There are many answers to that question. First and foremost, ‘hear’ and ‘here’ are indistinguishable in sound. Meaning, a fluent English speaker will...
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Juggling multiple build stages and test environments with TravisCI
At Babbel, we employ continuous integration to detect issues early in the development process. Our CI does not only automate the build and run different test suits but also handles some tasks for...
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How We Work
When I started at Babbel earlier this year, I was struck by how many great ideas the engineering department here had and how they saw their technology evolving. In fact, in my first week, a compelling...
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The evolution of our staging environment
Today, we will be talking about staging environment at Babbel and how we recently improved it. As a reader of our tech blog, there’s a good chance that you are already familiar with the concept of a...
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AWS Lambda and APIGateway as an AJAX-compatible API-endpoint with custom routing
AWS Lambda is a powerful tool to build serverless applications, especially when backed by APIGateway and Swagger. Lambda executes your code without the need for you to manage a dedicated server....
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From documentation to empowerment
This is the second in a series of blog posts entitled “How We Work” in which we share with you how we work in Engineering @ Babbel.Without history, there is no future.To effectively make technical...
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A Couple of Takeaways from the (European Women in) Tech Conference
On November 28-29, a fellow engineer from the Payment team, Karen, and I attended the European Women in Tech Conference in Amsterdam. It was my first tech conference and it was definitely the first...
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Signing OkHttp requests with the AWS V4 signing algorithm
A lot of companies nowadays depend on services provided by Amazon. Babbel is no exception. Calling these services through Http usually requires the requests to be signed. Although Amazon provides a...
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Babbel Neos: the story of eight new junior engineers at Babbel
Babbel Neos was born in May 2018: a Berlin-based, salaried engineering training program for applicants from unconventional, non-computer-science backgrounds. Our target? The aspiring developer who...
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Testing global event listeners within a React component
Although many developers working with React consider it an anti-pattern, occasionally, there is the need to listen and react to an event globally within a React component. As every good developer out...
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The significance of giving back to open-source
Companies should encourage and allocate time for their engineers to be able to contribute back to open-source. It does not only improve the product that they are contributing back to, but enhances the...
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Start the career as a Software Engineer
One year ago I changed my career from a Recruiter to a Junior Software Engineer. The path was long and challenging but it was worth it! I am happy to share my experience by giving the answers to the...
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Terraform provider for Code Climate is open-sourced
Here is a short release notice. At Babbel, we’ve been using Code Climate successfully for a while, but we were unhappy about the lack of the Terraform provider for it.Finally, we’ve decided to build...
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How we established monitoring for our product health
In the past, we introduced monitoring and alerting that tracks the technical status of our platform and services. However, we sometimes experience issues that our monitoring cannot detect. This could...
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Femgineering at Babbel: Of the Women, For the Women and By the Women
Change that only comes from the top can ultimately only deliver so much. What happens when women in tech drive the process, advocating for themselves? What results does that yield? Babbel is a window...
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Different ways to manage feature toggles on iOS
There are times during app development when you want to temporarily disable some functionality or enable it only under some conditions. For example, you work on a new feature that is not done yet, and...
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On the Hunt for the Fastest CI Service
A speed- and usability-focused comparison of the Travis CI, CircleCI, and Semaphore CI Continuous Integration services. figcaption { text-align:center; font-size:12px; } table { width:100%; border: 2px...
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How to Fight Retrospective Fatigue
figcaption { text-align:center; font-size:12px; } table { width:100%; border: 2px solid black; } th { text-align: left; } td { border: 1px solid #DDDDDD; padding: 0 5px;} It’s the end of a sprint....
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Movin’ on up: A femgineer’s journey at Babbel
This first installment in our series on Femgineers at Babbel, we talk with Pooja Salpekar about the process of transitioning from ground-level engineer to Engineering Manager, and what she’s learned...
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Babbel Neos: The first year of a junior developer
Gábor Török, the former Program Lead for our engineering mentoring program – named Babbel Neos – follows up with the trainees to see where they are, how the program helped them, and where they see...
View ArticleThe making of Replicator
A story of an internal tool – Replicator. It involves AWS Lambda, one of the hardest things in Computer Science, and Star Trek.BackgroundAt Babbel, we use AWS Lambda a lot. Lambda supports many runtime...
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A Look Back at Hack Day #9
Have a look inside one of Babbel’s most exciting initiatives, Hack Day, with the official aftermovie and an interview with Mo Mourad, one of the members of the winning project..embed-container {...
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Becoming a Femgineer at Babbel and relocating to Germany
This interview is part of our blog series on Femgineers (female Engineers) at Babbel. In this installment, we talk to Pallavi Subramanya who started her journey with us just a few months ago, moving...
View ArticleJuniors' Guide to Pull Requests
Guidelines on confidently reviewing senior team members’ code without feeling like a total newb.Sitting down at your desk in the morning and the first thing you see is the pull request from a senior...
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How to do more with fewer servers
March, 2020, won’t be easily forgotten. As schools, offices, restaurants and more began to close all around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed like “normal” life was coming to a...
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Tech Stack of Babbel
The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support engineering teams at Babbel to pick the best technologies for new projects. It provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to...
View ArticleChallenge your initial ideas
Recently I was working on a small command-line tool. The tool was supposed to take some user input and then render this information into a file using a predefined template. Let’s skip the user input...
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Integrating React Native with Babbel's native mobile apps
Back in mid-2018, my team discontinued a project to focus on our core product: the Babbel applications on Web and mobile. This change might sound easy. However, we wanted to support all Babbel users,...
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Babbel's hybrid lesson player
Babbel for iOS has evolved into a hybrid application. Hybrid applications combine native and web application parts. The latter allow us to reuse code for specific parts across platforms. If you’re...
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Poor Acceptance Criteria Can Ruin Any Great User Story - A Drawing Activity...
figcaption { text-align:center; font-size:12px; } table { width:100%; border: 2px solid black; } th { text-align: left; } td { border: 1px solid #DDDDDD; padding: 0 5px;} In agile software...
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