Engineering Culture at trivago

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.

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.

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. But it's our responsibility to provide the most accurate information to the best of our knowledge.

We recently hosted a Q&A on our trivago tech Twitter and Life at trivago Instagram page, where we gave our followers the opportunity to ask our developers anything. Even though we tried to answer all of them on the day, we decided to compile some of the most recurring questions and their answers for you below!

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.

We strongly believe in sharing knowledge not only internally, but also with the tech community around the world. This is one of the reasons why we support Open Source software through development and sponsorship. For example, we are the second biggest supporter on Open Collective and we have a ton of our own Open Source projects too. (Check out our Open Source page for more info.)

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 are originally from South Korea and we've been in Germany for about three years.

We often check the Facebook and Instagram posts from Life at trivago, so we could easily find out about trivago Tech Camp 2019 through social media.

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".