Patrick Gotthardt

COVID-19 has impacted the travel industry very severely. Even in these hard times, trivago remains committed to contributing to open source. As a tech company working on large-scale projects, we feel a responsibility towards supporting the open source community.

At the end of last year, to celebrate our continued sponsorship of the Open Source community, we hosted a small conference with special guests at our Düsseldorf campus. We initially hoped to welcome Tobias Koppers and Sean Larkin from Webpack, plus some internal speakers. What we didn't expect was the huge amount of fantastic speakers who wanted to present their projects to the community. In the end, Sean unfortunately couldn't make it but we did have a chance to welcome Marvin Hagemeister, Juan Picado, Norbert de Langen and Pia Mancini as speakers, plus our own amazing talents.

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 have all seen the job ads that look for a "developer with at least 8 years of experience and a Computer Science degree", a "JavaScript rockstar", or somebody with "excellent command of technologies A, B, C, D, and E".

Imagine a world without open source software. Pretty scary, isn't it?

There would be no free operating systems that let you take full control of your computer.

For a long time, we've mentioned that we're running our own JavaScript framework: Melody. Today, we are happy to share the framework we've been using since 2016 as an Open Source project with you. We designed Melody to be fast, memory efficient and to be flexible enough for the future.

For the past few years, Webpack has played a central and important role at trivago. We use it for handling SVG icons and to improve our startup time for the benefit of our users by loading resources on demand. We run a highly complicated build with plenty of custom plugins which perform all sorts of optimisations for us that no other tool would allow us to do. And because we truly love open source we’ve also open sourced our solution to speed up multi-compiler builds, which we rely on heavily to deliver ideal bundles to our users.

We've prioritized the resources that our users need to load and gained an impressive boost on our JavaScript application startup. In this article, I will explain how we've used Webpack, adjusted our handling of SVG icons and prioritized user needs to achieve up to 4.5 times faster startup.

When people hear about dropping support for a certain Internet Explorer version, they mostly think of all the CSS hacks and workarounds that could be removed as a consequence. However, dropping support for IE8 can have subtle, but profound effects on your JavaScript. Read on to learn what we experienced when discontinuing support for IE8.

When using webpack to build your assets, it's only a matter of time until you wish for targeted builds. Whether it's the output of the library you're working on (CJS, UMD, AMD, Var, etc.), or the specific feature set (IE8 support, no IE8 support). parallel-webpack can run those builds in parallel, thus making full use of the multi-core processing capabilities of modern devices.