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

1,600 applicants. 70 winners. €150,000 awarded. Meet some of the impressive recipients of our Scholarship for Women in Computer Science—and join us in celebrating their ambitious tech journeys! 👏  

We’ve agreed to acquire Brightcove (NASDAQ: BCOV), the popular streaming technology company, for around $233 million! 🎉

A quick look at the latest edition of State of the Spoon—and the Spooners in Wonderland party. 🎩 By day, we discussed business challenges, celebrated achievements, and… performed magic tricks? 🪄 And by night, we hit the dancefloor hard, as is tradition. 🪩 Grazie, Spooners, for everything you do. 🙌

🚨 We’re on the hunt for the most brilliant accountants around! 🚨 Are you an expert in international standards like IAS/IFRS, US GAAP, and OIC—or are you ready to become one? Can you consolidate financial statements like a pro? Are you fluent in Italian or English? We’re seeking exceptional individuals who thrive on numbers, love accounting challenges, and aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves. If you think you've got what it takes, send us your CV and a few words explaining why you'd be an Excel-lent fit for the job at this link: https://lnkd.in/dCF8367F. Best of luck! ☘️

🌟 Join us for an exclusive live stream! 🌟 Ever wondered what it’s like to be a software engineer or product manager at Bending Spoons? Tune in on November 18 at 6 pm Italy time to get the inside scoop from Spooners themselves. Don’t miss out—register at this link: https://lnkd.in/dxgVWw6x

Interested in how we look for top talent at Bending Spoons? 👀 Check out the article and learn all about our science-driven approach to hiring.

For the first time since 2019, users can organize events for free on Meetup. Previously, Meetup only offered paid subscriptions for organizers. This meant that someone new to organizing had to commit financially before even hosting their first event. With this in mind, we sought to create a new experience for first-time organizers: the Meetup Starter plan. 🏁 Meetup’s growth lead Alfredo Riggio explains: “We knew that costs were a barrier for beginners. At the same time, we saw the opportunity to grow the number of communities, groups, and events on the platform, which would attract new members and lead to a more active and engaged community. So, we challenged ourselves to find a sustainable way for first-time organizers to create Meetup groups and events for free. This required a delicate balancing act: • We needed a free option that stood on its own without undermining our paid plans. It took several iterations to find the right mix of features and benefits. • We also needed to keep the caliber of events high. Since removing the financial barrier could affect the quality of groups and events, we tested various requirements and limitations to ensure Starter groups met the same high standards as those from our paying organizers. Now, we’re proud to offer an accessible plan for new organizers—and thrilled by a 35% increase in sign-ups!”

"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. 👏