Continuous integration for mobile
Sven Kroell, Mobile QA Engineer at Babbel & Thanos Karpouzis, Senior Android Developer at Babbel held a talk about Continuous integration for mobile at this years Droidcon conference.The video...
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Evolution of Babbel’s data pipeline on AWS: from SQS to Kinesis
Various data storages have seen increased growth over the last few years. There are now so many of them that it becomes overwhelming to choose the right tool for the job. Among all of the Big Data...
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How we upgraded a big Ruby on Rails monolith with Zero Downtime
In September 2015, we started taking the Rails upgrade of our monolith seriously. We were running Rails 3.2 up to that point, and with Rails 5 on its way, we ran into the risk of using an unmaintained...
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Babbel 4th Hackday - our review
Twice a year we break out of our everyday routine and meet somewhere in Berlin to form ad hoc teams working on our own project ideas and hacks. Some of them eventually become actual Babbel projects.As...
View ArticleRetrofit 2 and Rx Java call adapter error handling
If you’ve kept yourself up to date with the latest in Retrofit you’ve soon came to the question “Should I or shouldn’t I update to Retrofit 2?”. At Babbel we’ve already answered the question, we...
View ArticleHow Travis CI helps us deploy to AWS Lambda
Want to simplify your infrastructure and reduce your operations overhead? Consider using AWS Lambda, and let Travis help you with the deployment.If you don’t know AWS Lambda, here’s how Amazon...
View ArticleAn approach to TDD in Android
If you started your Android development around the time instrumentation tests were the only tests supported out of the box, you probably remember how tedious it was to test drive an app. In fact,...
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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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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...
View ArticleWelcome to the Babbel Tech Blog
Hello World! Welcome to the Babbel Tech Blog.From today on, we, the Babbel engineering team, would like to share our experiences about developing and maintaining the Babbel platform: The website,...
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Dynamically Built Regular Expressions
TL;DR: If you need to build dynamically regular expressions memoize them. Compiling them is expensive.I don’t like memoizing methods, or caching in general. Obviously, caching adds more complexity to...
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