Posts about Engineering Culture

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.