Posts about Engineering Culture

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 an 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.

While rolling out our brand-new JavaScript framework to the trivago Hotel Search, we started the largest teaching initiative that our dev department has seen so far. 40 developers, many workshops, many screencasts, some newly discovered teaching talent, some frustration, a lot of puzzle pieces. Read how it went.

It has been about a year since we introduce the idea of guilds in trivago Software Engineering department in Düsseldorf. Here we share some of our learnings with it.

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.

One of our core values at trivago is fanatic learning. 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.

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.