Bending Spoons

We’re proud to reveal our new HQ. After years of intense work by some truly determined Spooners (Nicolle Wasserman, you’re our hero!) and partners, this is the result. Hope to see you here soon! ___ Nomade Architettura Interior Design Taramelli srl COIMA

"It's not about variety. I'm trying to contribute to one masterpiece and make it the best it can be." Big thanks, Siddhartha Ahluwalia, for having our CEO Luca Ferrari on The Neon Show to share the Bending Spoons journey and discuss what the future holds! 🔥 ▶️ https://lnkd.in/dmMimUHe

We knew we could make things faster. But not 1,000 times faster... *** When the team observed that sharing large notebooks and team workspaces in Evernote was frustratingly slow, they challenged themselves to make it faster than ever. The first step was to investigate the existing service to understand the underlying inefficiencies. Senior engineer at Evernote, Mattia Gentil, explains: “A few things were contributing to an overall slow experience: • First, the legacy service was breaking down each shared notebook or workspace into individual entities (such as notes and tasks) and fetching them one by one during the sharing process. • Then, for each of those entities, the service was performing two SQL queries: one to a database, and one to a secondary microservice to fetch additional metadata. • Finally, the service relied on a custom tree-like data structure to compute the new permissions resulting from the share. All of this—pulling individual entities, multiple SQL queries, an external miscroservice, and complex data structures—resulted in a laggy and unreliable customer experience. We were faced with a choice: We could work on incremental improvements. Or we could scrap the whole service and start from scratch.” In the end, the team decided to go all-in and rewrite the whole service. This was the more difficult path, but it had the potential to create the greatest value for our customers. “This was a tricky data engineering problem on many fronts,” Mattia continues. “We had to repackage the queries to go from six to two. We had to find a way to make a single request to our database, no matter the size of the notebook. And we had to introduce HashMaps to replace the custom data structures, integrating a new microservice into the main sharing service.” Everyone expected these changes to make the sharing experience smoother and faster, but it wasn’t until Mattia ran the first tests on the new service that he realized just how much speed they had unlocked. “When I saw the sharing speed was a thousand times faster in some cases, I couldn't believe it. I re-ran the tests at least five times before I was convinced it wasn’t some kind of fluke. From there, the improvements continued to pile up: Sharing times for smaller notebooks also got noticeably faster, and a common cause of timeout errors was eliminated completely, improving overall reliability. It was fantastic to see all our hard work pay off in such a clear and immediate way for our customers.” Huge bravo to the team for choosing the more challenging option and successfully executing such meaningful improvements. 👏

Many of Remini’s most popular filters have one thing in common—can you guess what it is? 👀 If you said “they’re cute as heck,” you’re right. So our product managers are always dreaming up new ways to turn our customers into their cutest selves. 💕

Remini has been downloaded over 120 million times so far in 2024—making it the second most downloaded AI app in the world. 🌍 😍 👏   Great job, team!

🇨🇭 Grüezi! Salut! Ciao! Allegra! 🇨🇭 First Ascent Switzerland is on its way! 🚀 Three days in Milan. All expenses paid. Exclusively for 20 top tech students from Swiss universities. Find out more and apply: bndspn.com/fa-ch

So glad you were a part of it, Khanak Gulati! 🤗

BUUUUUGS 🐛 😡 They're a part of life, and fixing them fast is half the challenge. But the other half—keeping customers in the loop—is an area the Evernote team identified as needing attention. And it makes sense: When a customer encounters an issue, they want to know if it's known. They want to know if a fix is on the way, and when to expect it. So, to bring clarity to unclear, frustrating situations, we've introduced the Evernote Bugfix Tracker. The tracker provides a clear view of what the Reliability team is working on at the moment. It's a simple document, because why overcomplicate it? With it, customers can get clarity that the matter's in hand—while the team's busy getting the pesky bug squashed.

Congratulations to the 40 incredible Ascenders who joined us these past weeks in Milan! 🌟 First Ascent Spain and First Ascent Women in Tech were a blast: We applaud your hard work and passion, and we can't wait to see where your journey takes you next. 🚀

"Who makes the most impact at Bending Spoons? The adaptable and curious: Engineers who take an interest in customer support. Product managers who code. Growth managers who dive into data..." Sofia Marchese and Florinda Giorgia Pannofino shed light on what it takes to build incredible products—and lead incredibly ambitious teams. Check out the full interview: