Latest articles

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.

When people hear about dropping support for a certain Internet Explorer version, they mostly think of all the CSS hacks and workarounds that could be removed as a consequence. However, dropping support for IE8 can have subtle, but profound effects on your JavaScript. Read on to learn what we experienced when discontinuing support for IE8.

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.

At trivago we store a subset of our realtime metric data in InfluxDB and we are quite impressed by the load it can handle. Despite all the joy, we had to learn some lessons the hard way. It is pretty easy to overload the database or the web browser by executing queries that return too many datapoints. To prevent that, we wrote Protector - a circuit breaker for Time series databases that blocks malicious queries.

While our company and our application were constantly growing, we often ran into some consistency issues between code and design. Because we didn't have a design/frontend system and development guidelines to follow, our UI became cluttered and unsustainable. This caused maintenance issues, slowed down our UI Development and caused us to produce technical debt with an overcomplicated CSS/DOM structure. In the end, we were afraid of spending our time on figuring out crazy rendering bugs rather than rapidly developing new UI features. I gave a lightning talk at the beginning of 2015 to present what we had learned at the LeanUX Meetup in Düsseldorf.

At trivago we rely heavily on the ELK stack for our log processing. We stream our webserver access logs, error logs, performance benchmarks and all kind of diagnostic data into Kafka and process it from there into Elasticsearch using Logstash. Our preferred encoding within this pipeline is Google's Protocol Buffers, short protobuf. In this blog post, we will explain with an example how to read protobuf encoded messages from Kafka using Logstash.