Posts about Engineering Culture

A quick recap 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.

FOSDEM in Brussels is one of our favorite conferences each year as it fully reflects our love for Free and Open Source software. 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.

Open Source? trivago. 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’ve spoken before about how Open Source allows everyone to win and we’ve explained how Webpack and Babel are vital infrastructure projects that are essential to modern web development. All of that is still true and that is why we are continuing our investment in Babel and Webpack for another year.

Gyumin Lee and Eunae Jang were participants in this year’s trivago Tech Camp. We did an interview with them to learn about their experiences and get some insights into the project development of triversity - a project management tool for university collaboration. Can you quickly introduce yourselves? We are originally from South Korea and we’ve been in Germany for about three years. How did you find out about the trivago Tech Camp?

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”. They are annoying in two ways. First, they are unrealistic. In today’s software developer job market, somebody fitting the above descriptions usually does not have to look for a job. Rather, the job has to find them.

It is not everyday that you get to chat face to face with the creator of a highly relevant open source project. Accordingly, we were highly anticipating a certain visit in mid-October, 2018.

Sometimes, when I look back over the time I have spent working at trivago, I see how it changed my life and how lucky I have been to get the chance to work among this amazing community, to live and to learn with them. I look back and see a younger version of myself looking desperately for something different and, by just sheer luck, getting it.

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. trivago hosts internal workshops and meetups regularly and offers numerous learning opportunities to the employees throughout the year. This time, we decided to do it a little differently.

Ten participants from nine countries, who have never met before, are assigned to teams to work on real-world projects. Can they be successful? We ran this experiment in September 2018 on the trivago Campus, and were blown away by the results.