Latest articles

Our first right-to-left platform was released in 2014. We had developed a solution to generate right-to-left CSS with Sass mixins and variables as we have described in a blog article. We used this approach for nearly 3 years but recently migrated the right-to-left generation from pre-processing to post-processing with RTLCSS. With this article I would like to share the reasons for the migration as well as our experiences and lessons learned.

At trivago, we are using an in-house developed Selenium framework based on cucumber-jvm to run automated browser tests. As the test suite increased (the time exceeded 45 minutes for a full run), we were looking for ways to move away from sequential towards parallel execution. For Cucumber, there are actually not that many options available:

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 a MVP (minimum viable product).

I love to take complex and tedious processes and automate the pain out of them until they are reduced to three or four steps!

As part of the release team of trivago, one of our roles is to create tools that make the lives of our developers easier so that they can create amazing features for our website.

Concepts like separation of concerns, logic decoupling or dependency injection are things we developers have heard more than a couple of times. At trivago, the Android app is developed using the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) architecture, aiming for views as dumb as possible, leaving the decision making to the view models. This leads to an increased test coverage since testing logic in views is something we can’t do that easily.

For our products, like the trivago hotel search, we are using Redis a lot. The use cases vary: Caching, temporary storage of data before moving those into another storage or a typical database for hotel meta data including persistence.

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.

Because our main application was getting ever more memory-hungry, our awesome JavaScript architecture team developed a modern, freakishly efficient component and rendering framework which we will open source and highlight in a series of future articles. In order to prove the framework's maturity, we wanted to roll it out to the trivago core application.

It has been about a year since we started the guilds in trivago Software Engineering department in Düsseldorf. You can read about the time when we started here.

I would like to share with you some things we have learnt. We have three guilds active at the moment: PHP, JavaScript and UX/UI.

Configuration management tools have recently gained a lot of popularity. At trivago we use SaltStack to automate our infrastructure. As the complexity of configuration files and formulas is increasing, we need a fast, reliable way to test our changes.

Around a year ago, in our large scale refactoring project also known as Project Ironman, we stepped away from image sprites that we used for our icons. In this post we will explain our reasoning behind this decision and how it improved maintainability and website performance.

When thinking about design patterns and architectures in iOS development, MVC might be the first thing that comes to mind for most of you. But throughout the last years, MVC got a really bad reputation. Probably a lot of you heard about MVC as the massive view controller. Due to Cocoa Touch's UIViewController it becomes really hard to separate concerns and implement a clean MVC-Architecture. Normally you want your controller separated from your view but as soon as you use a UIViewController these two get mixed up. Since this leads us to treating the UIViewController as just another view, it becomes crucial to define another layer to handle our business logic. This is where MVVM kicks in. If your are not familiar with this design pattern I recommend you to read the post by obic.io.

We've prioritized the resources that our users need to load and gained an impressive boost on our JavaScript application startup. In this article, I will explain how we've used Webpack, adjusted our handling of SVG icons and prioritized user needs to achieve up to 4.5 times faster startup.

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.

At trivago we are building and using a Pattern Library which is based on Brad Frost's Pattern Lab adapted to our needs; our patterns are written in Twig.