Engineering Culture at trivago

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.

You know those bugs, like, those. Where the application state dances around you like a crazed Polynesian fire dancer. Where changing the sorting order of a search in London reverts the result list back to Paris.... Seriously? Unfortunately, a lot of us are specialists in dealing with this kind of bug.