1. Location @ Jodel

2. Agenda
• Who is this?
• What’s Jodel?
• What location challenges do we have?

3. Who is this?
• Robert Tochman-Szewc
• Tech Lead / JavaScript Developer at Jodel
• M. Sc. Economics & Computer Science
• Master’s Thesis: Reddit and Brands

4. What is Jodel?
• Jodel connects everyone nearby in the most simple way
• The feed shows messages and pictures posted in your immediate
vicinity
• Users interact with content via
• Posts
• Comments
• Up & Down Votes
• Karma rewards users for activity and good content

5. What is Jodel? (2)
• Wherever you go, your feed will feel different

6. Challenges?
• Two Examples
• Challenge 1: Analytics
• Challenge 2: Location Calculations

7. Meaning for Analytics
• Very different user experiences depending on location
• (Many) common tools lack precise location features
• Only based on IP
• Many users with uncategorized location
• (Possible) loss of information
• Solution: Own analytics solutions from early on

8. Location Calculations
• Every database nowadays has geo-components for queries based on
distance.
• That’s how we started.

9. Location Calculations (2)
• Most of the request are geo-based ones
• Database size has increased a lot
• Read/write-locks started to become more and more of a problem
• Something had to be done

10. Softening up constraints
• Tradeoff: Functionality vs. Efficiency
• Find out what matters
• Crucial things for user experience
• Efficiency improvements where not crucial

11. What do users see (before)?

12. What do users see (after)?

13. Result
• No more geo calculations on DB, all index-based
• Just as efficient as other type of sorting
• Additional synergies for domain

14. Outlook
• New challenges everyday
• Small but efficient team
• One million users and growing

15. Thanks!