Developer Interviews: Justin Podzimek

What do you do and how long have you been at bbcom?

I’m currently a Principal Software Engineer and have been working at Bodybuilding.com for about 8 years now. In addition to normal development, I’m responsible for helping my team of client-side engineers, software engineers, and QA in whatever project we’re currently working on. I also have a helping hand in guiding the technology we use at Bodybuilding.com along with the other technical leaders.

Linux or Mac?

Mac, but only slightly. There are some applications and utilities on my Mac that just aren’t there, or aren’t as good, on Linux. That being said, a good portion of my work is spent in the command line, so as long as it’s not Windows, I’m not super picky.

What is a typical day like for you?

The mornings are fairly consistent, with a daily scrum to discuss what we’ve been working on and what’s coming up. After that, my day is spent in a combination of working with the other members of my team, meetings, and heads down with my headphones on getting some work done.

What is in your developer tool box?  

#1 - An IDE. Depending on what I’m working on, it’s either IntelliJ or Sublime Text.  #2 - Slack. Getting push notifications on my phone when someone needs me and I’m not online is a huge help. #3 - Google Chrome as my preferred browser.  #4 - Spotify. Music is important to my development mojo.  #5 - Terminal.

What are your favorite pro tips?

alias yolo=‘git commit -am “Deal with it” && git push  -f origin master’

Kidding. 

Honestly, the best tip I can give is "stay in the flow”. It’s tough to get back in once it’s broken, so do everything you can to minimize distractions.

What did you code up today?  

We’re currently in the process of migrating upwards of 28,000 articles to a new CMS system living in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Today, I continued on with the migration script to download every image from an article and upload it to S3. In addition, tweaking and fine-tuning the process to make sure the cutover is as seamless as possible to our readers.

What has been the most challenging problem you’ve had to solve?  

Last year, we update the wrapper (header, footer, and sidebars) across our entire site. This was a HUGE project. Every technical team was involved in updating around 15 different Java and PHP applications, migrating our front-end code to use a new build system and AngularJS, site-wide feature enhancements like search and a new navigation, and countless other features. This was all completed in just a few months before the holidays. In all my years working at Bodybuilding.com, never have I seen collaboration between such a large group work as smoothly as it did.

Any crazy Bbcom stories?

The only one that comes to mind is the “poo-nami”. I think that one should be left up to the imagination.

What is the best thing about working at Bbcom?

You get to work on the coolest, most cutting edge products, with the coolest, most knowledge people around. There’s a lot to love about working at Bodybuilding.com.

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Developer Interviews: Peter Davidson

What do you do and how long have you been at bbcom?

 I'm a principal engineer on a platform api team.  I've been with bbcom since April 2014.

Linux or Mac?

Mac

What is a typical day like for you?

 My day is coding, interspersed with a daily scrum, occasional meetings and our daily team basketball game.

What is in your developer tool box?  

 My two favorite tools right now work hand in hand ->  Hystrix and RxJava.  I use Hystrix to simplify threading and add bulk heading and circuit breaking.  I use RxJava to compose data from multiple data sources into a single data stream.  My favorite rx function is Observable.zip.

What are your favorite pro tips?

Threading is hard, caching is hard, naming is hard.  Make objects immutable and it makes caching and threading easier.

What did you code up today?  

Fixed a bug with user status being cached with a stale database value by a different thread, after removing from cache but prior to committing the transaction.   

Modified RxJava Observables to emit a fallback value when data is not present in the database. 

What has been the most challenging problem you’ve had to solve?  

We outgrew our current Mongo solution (without sharding) for our news feed.  We needed a solution that met both our scale and performance needs.  Earlier this year, we prototyped, developed and migrated to a news feed based on Cassandra.  The Cassandra news feed improved our performance and will allow us to scale for the future.

Any crazy Bbcom stories?

Nope

What is the best thing about working at Bbcom?

Lots of places have challenging problems, but the thing that makes bbcom a great place to work is the people I get to work with.  People at bbcom are passionate about technology and fitness.  We have internal tech meet-ups, daily basketball/football games and a lot of fun.

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Give back to the people that you owe your success to

It’s with great pleasure that I introduce, via the first official blog entry, the Bodybuilding.com engineering team.  Our intent with this blog, and our soon-to-be published open source projects, is to give back to the community from which we've learned so much.  Paying it forward is a core valuethat’s literally baked into our company’s DNA:

"Give back to the people that you owe your success to.

We will share insight into our experience by covering subjects such as performance, scale, frameworks, and mobile just to name a few.  This post will likely be one of the most vanilla and non-technical, so I'll try to keep it brief.  

If you already know about Bodybuilding.com (aka bbcom), then you can stop here.  For those who are new to the site, the rest of this post is for you.  

On the surface, bbcom may just look like another eCommerce company.  In reality, it’s an engineering powerhouse built on some of the most advanced platforms in existence.  There’s a reason we’re ranked within the top 200 on Alexa - we have a huge digital publication, the largest fitness social network, one of the top forums in the world, and the biggest sports nutrition site to boot.  Shocked? That’s understandable. When I came on board over four years ago, I too was surprised. What we’ve achieved since then is truly impressive.  

The graphic below was put together in 2012 for the “Tech Talk” we hosted in Boise, ID.

While we’ve surpassed these numbers by leaps and bounds, their magnitude alone shows the volume of work we produce and the number of people we reach.  All of this with a team of just over 100 passionate technologists with engineering offices in Boise, Portland and Costa Rica. 

What about the future?  We have big plans to continue revolutionizing the health and fitness space.  Our near term focus is to help our users create lasting change i.e. sticking to your workout schedule.  To create positive habits that stick with you indefinitely.  This, as it turns out, is a very hard problem to solve.  Here at bbcom we welcome the challenge with arms wide open.  Bring it on!     

Thank you for reading.  Check back often as we will be contributing regularly. Better yet, subscribe.

David Montz

VP Engineering & Product

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