Open Source at 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.

Adopting an automation-first mindset is the first step to reduce manual and repetitive work. Thinking this way enables us to move faster, and more efficiently. It unburdens us from mundane, repetitive work, allowing us to focus on solving problems and creating value in the Software Development Life Cycle.

I'm happy to let you know that we are releasing trivago/babel-plugin-cloudinary to the open source community! Throughout this article I will explain to you the motivation behind this project and how it works in detail.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine a world without open source software. Pretty scary, isn't it?

For a long time, we've mentioned that we're running our own JavaScript framework: Melody. Today, we are happy to share the framework we've been using since 2016 as an Open Source project with you. We designed Melody to be fast, memory efficient and to be flexible enough for the future.

On the 11th of November 2017 trivago hosted a Hackathon at NASDAQ's MarketSite in New York. The winners were awarded with a trip to Europe to visit trivago's offices as well as conference tickets for The Next Web, Amsterdam. We invited the winners to our office where we got the chance to interview them about their Hackathon experience.