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.

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.