As the VP says: “Behind every swipe is a system that manages millions of requests a minute, billions of events a day, terabytes of data, and all the scaling challenges of an immense, growing and global user base.”
Zhang speaks about the importance of applying constraints, such as keeping the codebase clean to enable the product to scale easily, and having a consistent development and release process.
She also talks about the importance of moving quickly, saying: “In the software industry, whoever moves fastest, while maintaining quality, will have a huge advantage over the competition. I believe moving at an accelerated pace doesn’t mean sacrificing the quality of our code.
“On the contrary, the constraints we adhere to can strengthen the entire system. We’ve seen this. Tinder used to release a new product on an six- to eight-week cadence, at a rate of six iterations per year. Starting April of this year, we moved to a two-week cadence, at a rate of 26 iterations per year.
“By accelerating the release cadence, we decreased the size of incremental changes; even very large features were chunked into smaller phases. As a result, every release is less likely to have massive issues.”
Zhang’s article was the first to be posted to the company’s new engineering blog Tindev, and was followed by an in-depth look at Tinder’s Smart Photos feature.
To read the full blog post please click here.