Engineering Culture at trivago

It has been a couple of months since Kyle, author of the “You Don’t Know JS” series, visited our trivago headquarters and gave us a wonderful JavaScript workshop. It was such an enjoyable week, being able to meet Kyle in person and walk through his thinking behind the materials.

Ten participants from nine countries — India, Cuba, Tunisia, England, Poland, Spain, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil. Even on trivago scale, this kind of diversity was impressive.

These were the software developers who were selected for the trivago Tech Camp 2018, an eight-day event taking place at the trivago campus in Düsseldorf, Germany. The event is aimed primarily at IT students, but the admission rules are not terribly strict — basic-to-intermediate coding and problem-solving skills suffice, and many candidates sent in code samples which were so advanced that we were quite impressed. In the end, we also had a physicist on board.

trivago engineering is excited and looking forward to welcoming Kyle Simpson to the spectacular new trivago Campus.

Kyle will give a 5-day JavaScript workshop starting on the 6th of August, 2018. While the workshop is primarily for trivago employees, we want to share this special occasion with the community as well. Therefore, we have reserved three spots for JavaScript enthusiasts who share our love for open source projects.

On the 11th of November 2017 trivago hosted a Hackathon at NASDAQ's MarketSite in New York. The winners were awarded with a trip to Europe to visit trivago's offices as well as conference tickets for The Next Web, Amsterdam. We invited the winners to our office where we got the chance to interview them about their Hackathon experience.

Hackathons! That’s where you feel super excited about creating something interesting, or useful, or just entertaining. They are a great way to encourage creativity and teamwork. Recently, trivago hosted a Python Hackathon in collaboration with the Python Usergroup Düsseldorf. The event was a full success!

Sometimes advertisements just have to be bold.

You might have found, that most job ads are quite generic. They lack a personal note. Why apply at a company, when even the job description sounds boring?

Education.

It's not only a topic that is very dear to our CEO Rolf Schrömgens, but that trivago as an entire organization cares about. Without good education, we will not be able to continue to add great people to our teams, or advance as a society.

We, Marcos Pacheco and Marcus Tannerfalk, work as Agile Coaches in the Palma office for the hotel search company trivago. This is our experience in working with a development team in daily sprints with the goal of delivering a MVP (minimum viable product).

At trivago we have been using code reviews as a part of our process for a good while now. In the beginning they weren't used by many teams but as word of their positive impact spread, more and more teams started adopting this practice, benefiting every day from its many advantages. Like any new practice it has been a learning process from the start. In this blog post I will cover why code reviews are incredibly beneficial when done right and will share what we have learned and which best practices we employ.

Because our main application was getting ever more memory-hungry, our awesome JavaScript architecture team developed a modern, freakishly efficient component and rendering framework which we will open source and highlight in a series of future articles. In order to prove the framework's maturity, we wanted to roll it out to the trivago core application.

It has been about a year since we started the guilds in trivago Software Engineering department in Düsseldorf. You can read about the time when we started here.

I would like to share with you some things we have learnt. We have three guilds active at the moment: PHP, JavaScript and UX/UI.

With engineers spread across four offices, collaboration and communication in trivago's IT is a challenge. Additionally, new engineers join the company all the time, which makes it even harder to figure out who to talk to about certain products, packages, and technologies.

How can we organize the collaboration of more than a hundred developers on a wide range of topics? How could they decide about good practices in the company? Those are some questions that drove trivago to give it a try on a different structure: the guilds.

Twice a year, the trivago software developers gather to have a 2 day internal hackathon. This December saw another round of ambitious creativity, relaxed atmosphere, and good food :-)

One of our core values at trivago is fanatic learning. A great way to learn and expand your knowledge is to creatively try new technologies, or to apply well known technologies to new situations, without having to pay attention to a strict schedule or deadline. Exactly that is what roughly 120 engineers were doing on the first Thursday and Friday in December: It was internal hackathon time, meaning each developer could spend two entire days on their own projects as he or she saw fit.

Last weekend, the Python Hackathon Düsseldorf took place at trivago's office. Although we were only five people we had a lot of fun. I took the chance to brush up my Python skills a little bit. Also I wanted to scratch an itch that was bugging me for a long time: our housekeeping book.