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.

These were the software developers who were selected for the trivago Tech Camp 2018, an eight-day event taking place at the trivago campus in Düsseldorf, Germany. The event is aimed primarily at IT students, but the admission rules are not terribly strict — basic-to-intermediate coding and problem-solving skills suffice, and many candidates sent in code samples which were so advanced that we were quite impressed. In the end, we also had a physicist on board.

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!

Twice a year, the trivago software developers gather to have a 2 day internal hackathon. This December saw another round of ambitious creativity, relaxed atmosphere, and good food :-)

One of our core values at trivago is fanatic learning. A great way to learn and expand your knowledge is to creatively try new technologies, or to apply well known technologies to new situations, without having to pay attention to a strict schedule or deadline. Exactly that is what roughly 120 engineers were doing on the first Thursday and Friday in December: It was internal hackathon time, meaning each developer could spend two entire days on their own projects as he or she saw fit.

Last weekend, the Python Hackathon Düsseldorf took place at trivago's office. Although we were only five people we had a lot of fun. I took the chance to brush up my Python skills a little bit. Also I wanted to scratch an itch that was bugging me for a long time: our housekeeping book.

You know those bugs, like, those. Where the application state dances around you like a crazed Polynesian fire dancer. Where changing the sorting order of a search in London reverts the result list back to Paris.... Seriously? Unfortunately, a lot of us are specialists in dealing with this kind of bug.