Goodbye Badoo/Bumble

After 5+ years I am leaving (with good memories).

After five and and a half years, today is my last day working at Bumble (formerly MagicLab, formerly Badoo).

It’s been a long time, for my standards, and this speaks volumes about how much I loved working for Badoo and Bumble. I am leaving behind a bunch of super-uber-smart people, unforgettable moments, and really good memories :)

It’s not been an easy decision: this company has given so much to me in terms of professional growth, but I am confident I am leaving what we’ve built together in capable hands.

Work

When I joined the company (at that time it was Badoo) I was part of a relatively small team, the Mobile Web team. It was like a family, and we really made waves (everyone agreed we were the best team in the company, sorry folks but I don’t make the rules).

A collage of photos of the Mobile Web team

I was hired as UI Engineer (at that time, for some reason, HTML/CSS developers were not allowed to touch JavaScript code, and JavaScript developers were not allowed to touch HTML/CSS code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) and I had to deal with every possible mobile browser on any possible mobile device. Believe me when I say it was fun!

A picture of a group of different mobile phones on a desktop, used for testing the app on real devices. — Just a few of the different mobile devices I used to test the Badoo Mobile Web application.

Well, from there things got better and better: in a few months I started to work on a “styleguide” for the UI components of our Mobile Web app, and in no time this became a fully fledged multi-product multi-platform design system called “Cosmos”.

I have written extensively about it in a series of Medium blog posts, so if you want to know more about it, there’s plenty to read:

From zero to Cosmos – Part #1, Part #2, Part #3,
How to manage your design tokens with Style Dictionary – Link
Design tokens beyond colors, typography, and spacing – Link
Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script – Part #1, Part #2
Measuring the Impact of a Design System – Link

The design system was fully supported by the company, we even had an official recognition when we opened the company-wide all-hands at the Bafta Theatre in London!

A collage of pictures taken during the "official" presentation of the Cosmos Design System at the company all-hands meeting. — The official presentation of the Cosmos Design System at the company all-hands meeting.

In a few months, the idea of a proper Cosmos Team was born. It took some time to have a full team working full time on the design system, but in the end, we made it: Luke Woollard as Full-Stack/JavaScript Engineer, Andrew Carter as Design System Designer, Mitya Kuznetsov as Front-End/UI Engineer (and more recently Sreeram Padmanabhan as Full-Stack/JavaScript Engineer to fill in Luke’s position).

Folks, you were colleagues 👩‍🚀, teammates 🚀 but most of all friends ❤️.

A picture of the Cosmos team hangout call for the standup meeting, on Luke Woollard's last day in Bumble — The Cosmos team 🚀👨‍🚀 standup meeting (on Luke’s last day in Badoo).

In these five years, Badoo/Bumble has given me plenty of opportunities (and I’ll be forever grateful for that) for professional and career growth. I would not be where I am today, without the “freedom to improve things” that I had in Badoo. Delegation, trust, ownership, but also responsibility and accountability, were the main traits of the company, under the direction of Andrey, Sergeii and Max.

Fun

But it was not only work. Oh no! Well, first of all the notorious “Badoo parties” (they were extravagant, extreme at times, a couple of times borderline, but personally I never witnessed a single episode of what later became a Forbes article that haunted the company and Andrey for years).

A collage of photos of the Badoo parties. — Yes, Badoo parties were… something!

And the food in the office was notorious as well: we were provided breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus every sort of snacks, beverages, treats one could imagine. And the food at the parties was always… incredible!

I also had a chance to visit the Moscow offices twice: one with my managers, and later with the whole team. Ohh, how much I loved it!

A collage of photos of the team in Moscow. — A few photos taken during our team building in Moscow.

Friends

But that’s not enough to describe what has been working in Badoo/Bumble all these years. Because as they say “The real treasure is the friends you make along the way” I am the richest person in the world. I can’t mention all of you, folks, so I will not call out anyone in particular. You know who you are! I really loved 💜💛 working (hard) with you, but I loved even more spending such unforgettable moments together. You’ll be forever in my heart ❤️.

The end

It’s been five fantastic years in Badoo/Bumble. But now it’s time for me to move on and look for something new: new challenges, new opportunities, new ideas. I need to step out (again) of my comfort zone, and see… what’s out there.

I’ll see you down the road 👋

A collage of photos of how life was in Badoo — Life in Badoo :)

Link: http://bumble.com

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