Blueground: Engineering blog

Rustic Witcher: Reimagining data anonymization

At Blueground, the majority of our services require data for testing end-to-end user journeys, whether client-facing or operational. Consequently, we need to de-identify PII from production data to provide our engineers with realistic datasets. This approach ensures our pre-production systems mirror the behavior of production environments in terms of data

Platform

98% Faster Data Imports in Deployment Previews

Check out our previous blog post to learn about implementing Deployment Previews, a concept popularized by Netlify and Vercel in Kubernetes. This post will explain our method of provisioning them promptly, rather than keeping our engineers waiting, using PVC snapshotting. This December, we went out and asked our colleagues to

android Featured

Mastering UI Testing for Android web forms

Yeah! We are Android engineers! 🎉 We can build almost anything by ourselves and make it run on any Android device! But sometimes we may need to use a third-party library or incorporate web-based functionality into a WebView to go fast. This can introduce challenges during UI testing. In this blog

web Featured

Accelerating theblueground.com: Five Core Web Vitals improvements

In the realm of modern hospitality, Blueground stands out by providing fully furnished apartments that redefine travel. However, beyond the sophistication of our spaces, a pivotal factor comes into play — our website's load speed performance. Serving thousands of daily users requires a digital experience that matches the excellence

Crafting a Floating Bubble in Android with Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose simplifies UI development with a declarative approach, improves productivity with live preview, and offers a modern, reactive framework for building dynamic and interactive user interfaces. In simple words, it makes it fast, easy, less error-prone, and funny to do complex UIs. At Blueground, we needed to create an

kotlin

Fixtures made easy with KSP

Standing on the shoulders of giants In a previous blog post, we discussed how to build tools with the help of KSP. In this one, we will present one of the tools we built in Blueground that recently has been released as an open-source project. Initially, we were inspired by

agile

A different way to run the daily scrum

Have you ever felt that the daily scrum offers no value? That we are wasting some precious time and getting everybody tired at the same time? I decided to write this blog post, in order to challenge the formalistic way in which the daily scrum is often run and share

devops

Deployment previews on Kubernetes

Deployment previews - made popular by platforms like Vercel and Netlify - are not commonplace in microservice architectures. At Blueground, we brought deployment previews to K8s using ArgoCD. Well, it turned out to be so good, it is worth sharing.

kotlin

Adding KSP to your toolbelt

Let's prepare the ground Before we start examining how to use KSP a.k.a Kotlin Symbol Processing, let's say a few words about what it is. For the familiars with the annotation processing, we could say that is an annotation processing tool for Kotlin. This

android

Keep your Tabs and List in sync using Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose In May 2019, Google announced a new UI toolkit for Kotlin developers. In July 2021 the first stable version of this toolkit was made available. So, it is a fresh but I believe very promising toolkit. Some of the benefits of using the Jetpack Compose will be mentioned

ios

Automate boilerplate code-generation with Sourcery 🪄

A detailed guide on how we use sourcery - an amazing code generation tool - at Blueground.

android

PagingData Assertions made possible!

Motives With the release of Jetpack Paging, loading RecyclerView's data in batches has become pretty fun and easy. Still, part of our job is not only to implement cool things but to write tests to ensure feature sustainability. The question in using Jetpack Paging is how easy it

microservices

Breaking a monolith: Data replication

Introduction The very concept of evolutionary software architecture is based on "listening" intently to the system's needs. As the system changes every day, so do its needs. Identifying the points in which architectural changes should be applied is key to the system's success. The

swift

Dependency injection in Swift

In this post, Efthymis examimes different approaches to implementing dependency injection in iOS.

databases

Zero downtime Postgres migration, done right

A step by step guide to migrate your Postgres databases in production environments with zero downtime

ios

Encrypt DNS in iOS 14 applications

In iOS 14, Apple introduced support for passing the DNS queries over HTTPS (DoH) or TLS (DoT). So why bother encrypting DNS queries when HTTPS is widely in use?

ios

How to type your diffable data source identifiers

In this post we describe three different data types for diffable data source identifiers.