I'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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