Here at Fitbit, we are no strangers to shipping hardware products. Making a new product is not an easy task, especially as we approach its ship date. During this time, our employees (both inside and outside of engineering) are a key part of testing the product and getting as many testing hours as possible. We encourage our employees to wear the...
Engineering at Fitbit prioritizes quality around the products that we build. We do a number of things to support this–one of them is pre-release load testing. This ensures not only that the services can handle traffic generated by millions of users, but also handle it with acceptable latencies. Fitbit commonly uses two strategies to load test...
The Fitbit Developer Tools team are committed to open-sourcing the tools we’ve created for the Fitbit SDK. This enables developers to build upon our efforts with their own tooling built specifically to suit their needs, or to collaborate with other developers in the community making development for Fitbit devices even more awesome. The Fitbit...
At Fitbit we utilize Bluetooth Low Energy, commonly known as BLE, for particularly heavy data transfers which are more complex than the common handful of use-cases for this extremely efficient radio technology. One of the perks of the job, in my opinion, is to try to deliver amazing experiences between wearables and cloud-connected mobile...
Motivation As one can imagine, the millions of active Fitbit users generate a lot of data. All that data has to be processed and stored so that users can look back on historical step counts, sleep, etc. One such storage service that I focused on as an intern on the Data Storage team, is the Device Communication Log (DCL) service. The messages sent...
Fitbit has always been committed to protecting consumer privacy and keeping data safe. Our internal security team is constantly testing our products for vulnerabilities as we strive to continuously strengthen our security. And, as our devices become more and more complex, we we are more mindful than ever that weaknesses can be difficult to...
How does a company go about keeping track of millions of customer devices? To combat this issue Fitbit’s core back end team – called Device Cornerstone – launched the Factory Upload project. It’s goal? To create a continuous streaming pipeline of manufactured Fitbit data, all the way from the factory to our main...
Ensuring that Fitbit’s site is always available is a top priority for our engineering organization. This is especially true during the annual holiday season that spans Black Friday through the end of the year. Christmas day brings extra pressure and visibility on our site because it is the busiest day of the year for user account creation and...
We were thrilled to hear today that the Fitbit Security Team has been awarded two awards in Bugcrowd’s second annual Buggy awards. This year we took home the “Best Response Time” and “Program of the Year” awards. Now that we have three Buggy Awards in our trophy cabinet (we took home “Best Response Time” last year) it feels like a...
On February 23, 2017, Google Project Zero and Cloudflare revealed the existence of the Cloudbleed bug. Fitbit uses Cloudflare as our content distribution network and the majority of our web and API traffic routes through the Cloudflare platform. We learned of the issue the same way as everyone else – when security-minded team members at...