Read Improving Evaluation Practices in Natural Language Generation

Improving Evaluation Practices in Natural Language Generation

Throughout last year I had the opportunity to participate and collaborate on multiple research initiatives in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) in addition to my responsibilities as a Data Scientist at trivago. NLG is the process of automatically generating text from either text and/or non-linguistic data inputs. Some NLG applications include chatbots, image captioning, and report generation. These are application areas of high interest internally within trivago as we seek to leverage our rich data environment to enrich the user experience with potential NLG applications.

Read trivago joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

trivago joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Last year, when visiting CloudNativeCon/KubeCon Europe in Barcelona (one of the biggest cloud-focused conferences in Europe), I noticed that there were some companies present in the exhibition space whose primary focus wasn't software development. I was surprised to see companies from finance to sportswear as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sponsors. There I discovered various CNCF membership types and learned about the End User Supporter membership.

Read The First Prettier Plugin For Twig is Here

The First Prettier Plugin For Twig is Here

trivago open sourced a Prettier plugin for the Twig template language. It is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can access it on trivago's Github space.

The trivago core product runs on our own frontend framework Melody. Melody uses a Twig-inspired template language because when it was introduced, it had to be interoperable with our existing codebase, which was based on the Symfony PHP framework with Twig as the default template language.

Read An Open Door to Open Source: Relive our OSS Conference

An Open Door to Open Source: Relive our OSS Conference

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.

Read Meet us at FOSDEM, Brussels, Belgium

Meet us at FOSDEM, Brussels, Belgium

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. (Check out our Open Source page for more info.)

Read A New Functional Approach to Complex Types in Apache Hive

A New Functional Approach to Complex Types in Apache Hive

When faced with the challenge to store, retrieve and process small or large amounts of data, structured query languages are typically not far away. These languages serve as a nice abstraction between the goal that is to be achieved and how it is actually done. The list of successful applications of this extra layer is long. MySQL users could switch from MyISAM to InnoDB or use new algorithms like Multi-Range-Read without a change to their application. We, as Hive users, can effortlessly switch our complete processing from MapReduce to, say, Tez or Spark. All this is possible because of SQL serving as an abstraction layer in between. However, in this article, I will outline the effects when SQL - specifically hiveQL - misbehaves and which steps we are taking to recover.

Read Nine Nations, United in Code

Nine Nations, United in Code

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.

Read Improving Your Data Layer with Rebase on Python

Improving Your Data Layer with Rebase on Python

Technology keeps getting better and better which, at some point, makes us think "Should I migrate to the latest version/technology or not?" Well when you decide to use a better technology for your application, you have to also consider rewriting the code that your application runs on. The business logic remains the same in most of the cases but the data model would definitely change if you are switching from SQL to some NoSQL Technology for example.