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...
Software is, by default, opaque. We can easily see what the output is, but understanding why requires adding instrumentation: metrics, log statements, and other windows into the inner workings of our process. Adding too little instrumentation makes it difficult to detect and respond to problems as they arise. Adding too much obscures the...
Our job as program managers is to help create and maintain high performing teams. In most cases, this is much easier said than done. While many view the program manager as the person who creates schedules, corrals team members for meetings, and follows up on action items, in reality we do much more. In most cases, program managers help coordinate...
If you visit sites such as dribbble.com or behance.net you will note that there are a multitude of design mockups posted that look spectacular, but you rarely see apps in that style in the app store. There are a variety of reasons for this. For one, a gorgeous design mockup can quickly fall apart when faced with real world data, usability issues...
This summer Margaret Tian interned on Fitbit’s Performance and Capacity team and worked on researching, designing, and implementing an automatic mean shift detection system to help with production site health monitoring. Here she describes her project and her experience as an intern at Fitbit. Background What is a mean shift? A mean shift...