Summing up my incredible journey at trivago
After almost three years, I left trivago last Friday. I shared this on my social accounts with the promise to write about my journey. This is going to be an emotional and a very sincerely written blog post.
In my last 1:1s with my leads on the last days, I received very good feedback on how inspiring and empowering my engineering journey had been. As much as I was flattered to hear this, I think this worked both ways. trivago, with its diverse people and its passionate culture, empowered me and gave me space to create as well.
It might sound cheesy to you so, let me tell you my story.
Before I joined trivago, I was a Junior Software Engineer with full of energy. I was looking for companies who could see my potential primarily rather than years of experience. My 3 hours long on-site interview was full of fruitful conversations that at those moments I knew this was a good place to be.
I started in the Software Operations where I did A LOT of automation work, maintenance of container schedulers and cronjob frameworks to give developers a platform to move faster. That team later grew into an SRE team that handles trivago’s backend infrastructure in the cloud. My last two years were a lot about Cloud technologies, infrastructure as code, monitoring, alerting, starting on-call rotation, post mortems etc. It has been technically and personally very challenging that I don’t think I had such a learning speed in my entire life!
Next to all the bleeding edge technical work, trivago encouraged me to engage with company culture fully. They supported me on my public speakings; we organized coding workshops, hackathons, interviews, mentoring sessions for students where I was able to embrace and contribute to the engineering culture. I also took part in the maintenance of our tech blog, encouraged people to write fantastic work they have been doing. I think all this was possible because of one thing;
We were free to challenge ideas, supported for entrepreneurial actions and have space to be creative.
First of all, as a Software Engineer I am very grateful for;
- every platform and infrastructure work that we have delivered for a better experience to our engineers as well as trivago’s users
- all the incidents that gave me sleepless nights but surely gave me lots of learnings
- every post mortem that helped us to be a real team with its blameless and actionable stories
with all this I am also grateful for;
- all the fun events and hackathons we organized to learn
- every tech blog post and deploy that showed our tech stories
- all the mentoring sessions that helped computer science students
Most importantly, I feel lucky to have worked with all the intelligent and nice human beings. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. I am content, happy and excited for my next chapter!
Love,
Busra
