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Almost six months ago, our team started the journey to replicate some of our data stored in on-premise MySQL machines to AWS. This included over a billion records stored in multiple tables. The new system had to be responsive enough to transfer any new incoming data from the MySQL database to AWS with minimal latency.

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.

Exciting times were ahead of us, but as a wise man once said: great power carries great responsibility.

There we were, facing what could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build an app from bottom up. But how could we exceed the expectations of so many users with the first release on day 1?

Back in April 2015, I felt the need to do some work and earn money besides my studies in Computer Science at the University of Düsseldorf. After doing some research and crawling a few job platforms, I finally applied for a job in IT-Support at trivago. The job offer looked very appealing and life at trivago promised to be fun.

As we all adventure around this space that we call the Internet, consuming content is often on our minds. Naturally with the vast amount of data, filtering out what’s not interesting is a huge time saver. In order to help you find your ideal hotel at the best price, trivago’s filters are one of the best ways to do so. Sadly, some visitors couldn’t even access them due to poor accessibility and performance.

Hackathons! That’s where you feel super excited about creating something interesting, or useful, or just entertaining. They are a great way to encourage creativity and teamwork. Recently, trivago hosted a Python Hackathon in collaboration with the Python Usergroup Düsseldorf. The event was a full success!

If you’ve never heard about Memcached, it is simply a high-performance, distributed memory caching system which uses a key-value store for strings and objects. Usually, it serves for saving data originally retrieved from a database or external services. As simple as it is, it can improve the performance of your website quite a bit. The API of Memcached is very simple and accessible from most of modern programming languages. A simple example:

We do think that our tech blog is full of interesting things powered by our engineers' great stories. Let me take you on a journey of how we maintain the trivago tech blog from the technical perspective and how we recently automated its deployment process.

We all have been there, done that. You want to build an API that allows you to manipulate your entities so you start checking which specification to use. Maybe REST or JSON API or maybe no specification.

At trivago, we use a Cucumber based framework for end-to-end tests of our most important web applications. Cucumber stores test result as JSON files which can be turned into human-readable test reports.

We're a data-driven company. At trivago we love measuring everything. Collecting metrics and making decisions based on them comes naturally to all our engineers. This workflow also applies to performance, which is key to succeed in the modern Internet.

When I joined trivago a year ago, we had problems with our releases. The traffic was increasing each day. When we put the server back into the load balancer without warming up the OPcache it would die. From time to time the warmup failed silently. Our DCO (data center operations) crew had to log into the servers and restart a few processes manually. During this time every release was very intense.

Accessibility is an important topic for anyone who builds things for the web, and one that is neglected far too often. We at trivago have also been guilty of this, but we are slowly making changes with the aim of improving the accessibility of our site. Identifying and implementing these changes has not been easy. We have faced a number of challenges along the way, and we continue to do so. But we are committed to improving our site so that anyone can access and use the service we provide, regardless of how they do so.

Sometimes advertisements just have to be bold.

You might have found, that most job ads are quite generic. They lack a personal note. Why apply at a company, when even the job description sounds boring?