Day in the life of a Software Engineer in Hotels
By Hongyi Duan
Click Travel is shaping the future of business travel with our award-winning corporate travel management and booking platform. Our goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of business travel for everyone involved. But for all the developers in Click, it is more like an advanced technology company. We are all in a department called “ProdEng” — Product and Engineering Team. We build our own cloud-based platform on AWS and make API connections with lots of 3rd party suppliers which are related to Flights, Hotels, Trains and other business travel channels.
The ProdEng department is formed by lots of small, cohesive, autonomous teams. As Hotel Team Engineers, we try to provide an informed, intuitive and stress-free hotels experience to give customers autonomy and confidence. One of our most important services is our “Property Directory”, a global database of places to stay, containing over 1,000,000 hotels, guest houses, B&Bs, hostels and other forms of accommodation. Each property in the directory is assigned a globally unique Universal Property Code (UPC) and we need to maintain this service and make sure all our properties can be bookable with main suppliers (e.g. Booking.com, Premier Inn, Travelport etc) through APIs. Apart from that, we also need to make sure our customers get competitive hotel rates by integrating Corporate Hotel Rates.
So, what’s it like to be an engineer in the Hotels team? Let me walk you through a typical day for me:
9:00am
Click has a wonderful flexible remote working policy for developers. But my flat is just about 10 mins walk away, I almost work in the company every day. 9 am is usually the time I arrive at the office. With a cup of hot tea, I start a day of work. We just completed a big project that allows all our clients can search and book booking.com genius rates on our platform last week. It is really great for our clients to reduce the cost of hotel bookings and achieve one of our team goals. But this will also have a huge impact if there was something wrong with it. Before it was launched, we had lots of discussions with booking.com. I monitored it during the weekend and it seemed to work well, though I still contact booking.com via emails to make sure everything went ok on their side as well. Also, I track our multiple services and logs to check for any potential problems or incidents.
10:45am
10:45 am is the time for hotels team to have our daily standup meeting. We have 3 developers and 1 product owner in the Hotels team. Most of the standup meetings are held via online video chat rather than physically “standing up”. We are a very agile team, using Sprints as our current development methodology of choice. In the standup meeting, everyone focuses on the JIRA cards/tasks in the current sprint and we give a brief update about the progress of this task. Then, we decide if this card moves to the next step or not. I am talking about the current step of booking.com genius rate and we are all very happy to move this card to “DONE”.
11:00am
After the stand-up meeting, I am looking to pick up a fresh task to build the UI and display contact rates to our account managers (who manage our client’s accounts). Another developer in our team has completed the back-end part and there is an API which gets all rate access codes (used to achieve corporate negotiated rates) for one customer.
When I try to test the API before start working the UI part, I am facing a CORS issue response. Every team in ProdEng has a great culture that encourages you to ask for help when you need. So I ask in the Hotel slack chatting channel. After I have a discussion with my team, I find I made a typo mistake — missed an “s” at the end of a URL path.
12:00pm
12:00pm to 1:00pm is normally my lunchtime. Click is in a very great position in Birmingham city centre. So I have lots of options for lunch. :)
1:00pm
I spend some time reading after lunch. We have a great knowledge sharing culture in Click. There is a specific chatting channel called #pet-learning in Slack which is very useful for everyone to easily share tips/skills at any time. Also, we have an internal blog which contains lots of valuable articles including: advanced technology, new framework, problem-solving summary, system architecture design and etc. I read some external blogs and news as well.
2:00pm
I join the Snippet Review meeting which occurs every Monday. It starts at 2 pm and normally takes about 30 mins. This meeting is open to everyone and gives a quick summary of the progress of current tasks across the whole ProdEng department. I am very interested in the current status of the company projects not only for Hotels and this is the reason I will join this meeting sometimes.
2:30pm
A most exciting time of a day is coming — programming. As a software engineer, I really enjoy coding and I will get great satisfaction when I deliver a new feature for a customer. The task I have is front-end work to invoke an existing API and display the response to the clients. The basic UI design has been discussed in a previous design session. The whole work is based on our current Angular framework and I use Karma to complete the UI test to make sure it works as expected.
Then I raise a GitHub pull request and request a review to my team. They give positive feedback and merge the change. Woo!!! Then, we will still do several steps before we launch it to all clients. We leverage Continuous Delivery at Click. We use Bamboo to automatically trigger each stage: integrated version control -> build -> unit testing -> client UI testing -> end-to-end testing -> deployment and release.
Although I just did the code part, actually after some minutes, the change is able to be preview in our UAT (pre-production) environment. That is really awesome. And if every step in the Bamboo pipeline can be executed successfully, the change will be deployed to Production and released to our customers!
5:30pm
Normally between 5:00pm to 5:30pm, I finish this fantastic working day and then head home for my dinner and gym.
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About the author
Hi, I am Hongyi Duan from China. I’ve worked at Click Travel in Birmingham for almost 2 years as a Software Engineer in the ProdEng Hotels Team after I got my Master degree in the UK. It is a great place to work and I learn so much from it. Outside of work, I go to the gym about 4 or 5 times a week and I am a big fan of Sony PS4 games.
