Happenings
“What Could Possibly Go Wrong…?”
On Saturday December 3rd Christoph Reinartz, a Fullstack UI Developer & UX Engineer at trivago, takes to the stage to give a rather brave opening session presentation at the Noslidesconf in Bologna. We caught up with him to find out if he is crazy, a genius, or perhaps a little of both.
Life at trivago: Hi Christoph, you’ve done a fair few talks this year around the globe, what makes this one so special?
Christoph: Well as you probably can tell from the name of the conference there are no slides, everything is just live and hands on.
Lat: Sounds like a refreshing approach! What time is your talk?
C: It is the opening session talk of the conference, the first one Saturday morning at 9.15am, and lasts for 45 minutes.
Lat: And what can the attendees expect from your presentation?
C: Well… The big idea is to do a live deployment test on the trivago site, showing how to build a feature on such a large scale.
Lat: All live?
C: Yes all completely live!
Lat: Wow, sounds errr… bold! (or risky?..) are you confident?
C: Yes I am confident! What could possibly go wrong, right? YOLO! I mean, even if it does, then at least it is authentic, which is one of our core values at trivago!
Lat: So how will the 45 minutes go down? Presuming everything goes to plan of course?
C: Firstly I will give an introduction explaining to the audience the architecture of the application, how it works and what technology and tools we use. I’ll then create a feature ticket in Jira as the kick-off for my feature, then I’ll implement it while patiently explaining what I do and following our standard procedure developing a feature into our codebase and finally when it is working I will create the pull request, so that it can be reviewed. In order for this to work I have the word of some of our developers that they will be up and ready to approve the code! (They already looking forward to moan about my code, which in regards to the time limit I have cannot be perfect). Once that is done we can start triggering the deployment, which takes about 7 minutes and in that time I can answer some questions and give an overview of what is happening. Once it is done I’ll show the feature on the internal staging system and activate the A/B test there to show that it is working as expected.
Lat: Sounds very entertaining!
C: Yes I hope it will be! I cannot go into too much detail, as I still have to be careful about exactly what I do because e.g. updating some dependencies with composer or NPM might already eat up all the time I have! So it won’t be a very sophisticated feature, I’ll will change something related to the visual appearance of the site. But nevertheless it will show the complete workflow / life-cycle of a feature implementation on such a large scale . It will be very interactive and that should hopefully wake some of the audience up in the morning ready for the rest of the day.
