Makefiles in 2019 — Why They Still Matter

trivago Intelligence was born in 2013 with two main objectives: First, to provide bidding capability to the advertisers, who are listed on trivago, and second, to provide them with metrics related to their own hotels; like clicks, revenue, and bookings (typical BI data). This project faced a wave of inevitable data growth which lead to a refactoring process which produced a lot of learnings for the team. As I expect it to be useful for other teams who deal with similar challenges, this article will describe why a team started a full migration of technologies, how we did it and the result of it.

Open Source? trivago. When we announced our renewal of our investment in Webpack and Babel last year, I found a tweet from Guillermo Rauch, CEO of zeit.co, one of the most interesting serverless computing companies at the moment. We’ve spoken before about how Open Source allows everyone to win and we’ve explained how Webpack and Babel are vital infrastructure projects that are essential to modern web development. All of that is still true and that is why we are continuing our investment in Babel and Webpack for another year.

Adopting an automation-first mindset is the first step to reduce manual and repetitive work. Thinking this way enables us to move faster, and more efficiently. It unburdens us from mundane, repetitive work, allowing us to focus on solving problems and creating value in the Software Development Life Cycle. So the first thing is to look for a tool that helps us write automated tests faster and is easy to maintain.

Gyumin Lee and Eunae Jang were participants in this year’s trivago Tech Camp. We did an interview with them to learn about their experiences and get some insights into the project development of triversity - a project management tool for university collaboration. Can you quickly introduce yourselves? Hi! My name is Eunae Jang and I’m completing a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University. I will start my Master’s in CS from next semester.

Introduction As a user researcher, it is important to know more about our users and their preferences concerning our product. One way to do that is by conducting surveys. In order to gather user feedback from our global markets, we need to conduct a survey with a slightly different set of questions/translations for different countries, and then analyze the results and compare if there is any difference across countries concerning user needs.

While searching for “Spa and Wellness hotels in Berlin…” I land on trivago. Surprisingly the main images of the hotels exactly reflect the spa concept that I am searching for. It helped me better compare hotels on the list for finding my ideal accommodation for my vacation! This was the user experience we were looking for when we kicked off the Image Concepts project at trivago. The users with clear hotel search intent who are looking for a specific concept hotel before coming to trivago are redirected to the landing pages related to that particular topic.