Posts about Engineering Culture

One of my favorite events throughout the year is the trivago tech get together. It’s the one time where we all get together to celebrate tech. Here are some impressions from 2019: See all those happy people mingling in person? Guess it’s obvious why we had to change this up for 2020. Why internal conferences are still important We managed to get a lot done this year, but communication across teams was getting harder through virtual meetings.

What does Data Science at trivago look like in practice? Which major challenges have we encountered as a travel-tech company since the COVID-19 outbreak? What’s it like to work in Data Science at trivago? In this Q&A with James Neaves (Business Intelligence Lead), Andrea Fernandez (Data Science Team Lead), and Sheetij Jain (Product Manager in User Profiling) we’ll answer all these questions and more. Too Long; Didn’t Read? Jump directly to the questions!

This is part two of our series about trivago engineer’s side projects. The first part is here. As always, take a look and feel free to reach out to any of them if you’d like to exchange on any of their topics! Hello Rust Our backend engineer Matthias Endler is running a YouTube channel about the Rust project as a side-project. In there he explains the ins and outs of the language, but his goal is not only to present information; rather, he’s striving to inspire fellow developers to try the language and stay curious.

Fanatic learning is one of trivago’s core values that forms a fundamental part of our engineering culture. It’s very valuable to have curious minds around you that connect the dots to come up with new ideas and love to exchange knowledge on various topics. Since many of our engineers are involved in their own initiatives and projects outside work, we decided to introduce you to some of these side projects. The goal is to recognize their achievements and share their knowledge with our broader tech community.

Over the past few months, I was given the opportunity to try out the life of a Product Owner (PO), alongside retaining my responsibilities as an engineer. The life of a PO has always intrigued me since I joined trivago 2 years ago, and I always found myself unofficially taking on roles that were traditionally done by them. Things like reaching out to stakeholders for collaboration, thinking about KPIs and impact, and general “aligning”.

In our new series, trivago Tech Check-in, we’re introducing you to some of our tech talents from across the globe who help keep our metasearch engine running smoothly everyday. In this first edition, you’ll meet Fabian Fritzsche, an engineering intern that works on the Microservice-System that feeds our GraphQL API with up-to-date hotel data.

Breakpoint 2020 is a 4-day virtual summit on everything testing. It takes place on July 20-23, 2020. One of our engineers, Benjamin Bischoff will be giving a talk and BrowserStack did an interview with him! After 15 years as a game/application developer and trainer, Benjamin decided to make test automation his career. He’s currently a Test Automation Engineer in trivago’s core QA team. Benjamin is also the author and maintainer of two open source projects for Cucumber BDD parallel test execution and reporting.

Throughout my career, I’ve had times where I worked 100% remotely. Overall working remotely can have benefits and even make you more productive as an engineer. I would like to share 5 tips that have worked very well for me. TLDR: Communicate more than you would normally do.

1. Leverage working asynchronously This might seem as a disadvantage initially, but leverage that you are not communicating synchronously with each other. Use tools such as Drift, or any other video recording software to ask the other person questions.

Imagine you go to your hotel for check-in and they say that your dog is not allowed even though the website clearly states that it is! trivago gets information about millions of accommodations from hundreds of partners and they keep on updating. There are many differences not just in the data format, but also in the data itself. There can be many discrepancies in the information and consolidating them can be a very complex process.