Give back to the people that you owe your success to

It’s with great pleasure that I introduce, via the first official blog entry, the Bodybuilding.com engineering team.  Our intent with this blog, and our soon-to-be published open source projects, is to give back to the community from which we've learned so much.  Paying it forward is a core value that’s literally baked into our company’s DNA:

"Give back to the people that you owe your success to.

We will share insight into our experience by covering subjects such as performance, scale, frameworks, and mobile just to name a few.  This post will likely be one of the most vanilla and non-technical, so I'll try to keep it brief.  

If you already know about Bodybuilding.com (aka bbcom), then you can stop here.  For those who are new to the site, the rest of this post is for you.  

On the surface, bbcom may just look like another eCommerce company.  In reality, it’s an engineering powerhouse built on some of the most advanced platforms in existence.  There’s a reason we’re ranked within the top 200 on Alexa - we have a huge digital publication, the largest fitness social network, one of the top forums in the world, and the biggest sports nutrition site to boot.  Shocked? That’s understandable. When I came on board over four years ago, I too was surprised. What we’ve achieved since then is truly impressive.  

The graphic below was put together in 2012 for the “Tech Talk” we hosted in Boise, ID.

While we’ve surpassed these numbers by leaps and bounds, their magnitude alone shows the volume of work we produce and the number of people we reach.  All of this with a team of just over 100 passionate technologists with engineering offices in Boise, Portland and Costa Rica. 

What about the future?  We have big plans to continue revolutionizing the health and fitness space.  Our near term focus is to help our users create lasting change i.e. sticking to your workout schedule.  To create positive habits that stick with you indefinitely.  This, as it turns out, is a very hard problem to solve.  Here at bbcom we welcome the challenge with arms wide open.  Bring it on!     

Thank you for reading.  Check back often as we will be contributing regularly. Better yet, subscribe.

David Montz

VP Engineering & Product