One of the many responsibilities of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), is to ensure uptime, availability and in some cases, consistency of the product. In this context, the product refers to the website, APIs, microservices, and servers. This responsibility of keeping the product up and running becomes particularly interesting if the product is used around the world 24 hours every day like trivago. And just like in the medical profession, someone has to be on call to react on failures and outages outside of the office hours.

From April 2020 until the end of 2021, we have put trivago’s web frontend on a new tech stack. Having moved away from a quite large PHP codebase and our home-grown JavaScript framework Melody, trivago now runs on a Next.js application, written in TypeScript.

At trivago, we run webservices with complex backends in different regions around the globe 24/7. Our system is being iterated and developed on a daily basis. Naturally, mistakes will be made and something will break eventually. Engineers being on-call are the first responders to issues with negative impact on our users and the business.

trivago is the home to 500+ tech specialists from all corners of the globe – each with their own unique background and story of how they ended up here. Our trivago Tech Check-in series focuses on individual engineers' experience during their time at trivago. In this edition, you'll meet Mohammad Abed – a frontend software engineer who has been with trivago for 11 months now and is working on our Express Booking product.

In the middle of summer 2021, we hosted one of our favourite annual events of the year - trivago Tech Week! This year’s tech week had a new, hybrid format, featuring a wide variety of talks and exchange forums, hosted both by internal talents and external speakers. To make things even more engaging, the week included virtual opportunities for talents to gather and converse across departments, a gaming tournament and a highly anticipated live-music concert to tie everything together!

While engineering, we fix bugs, create new systems, build workflows and establish processes. Our job is to change things. Changing things can involve mistakes that ultimately lead to the failure of a particular system. To learn from these failures, a retrospective is helpful to get to the root of this problem. In the tech industry, a Blameless PostMortem is the right tool for this job.

Five years ago trivago started to build guilds – small communities dedicated to certain topics or technologies – as a need arose to organize the collaboration of more than a hundred developers on a wide range of topics. You can read more about how we started in the previous blog posts Part I and Part II.

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:

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.

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!

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. Take a look and feel free to reach out to any of them if you'd like to exchange on any of their topics!

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". Perhaps it's because I simply love the sound of my own voice, but I've always felt a particularly high level of gratification from contributing in meetings. "Aligning" is an overused word in the workplace, but it is the best to describe where I derive my professional gratification from, outside of building things with code.

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.

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. He is an occasional speaker at conferences on testing and automation.