Our Sponsorship at J On The Beach 2022

Last week J On The Beach 2022 was a success, and we had the opportunity to be a part of it. But, why does a Data Platform for the hotel industry sponsor such an event? What was the agenda for The Hotels Network? Let me try and share some of our thoughts.

I have been sending some of my engineers to this conference since the first edition. They always returned with various new ideas to try, many contacts and great/fun stories. So, when I heard this event was back to “real life” I knew I wanted to be part of it. We decided quickly on which level of sponsorship we wanted (Gold, in our case) and why. We wanted to be a large team, and we wanted to have enough time on the main stage to properly show what we do at The Hotels Network.

Anna, Nicola, Sergio, David, Alex, Guillem and I made up the team representing The Hotels Network at the event. They belong to our Data Engineering, Data Base Administration and Backend Teams.

While my team was a bit too shy to be in the spotlight themselves (I’m sure this won’t be the case next time), we collaborated on preparing the talk together and I had the privilege of delivering the presentation.We wanted to share how data flows from our agent (installed on our client’s website), enriched by our intel team, then shared across services by our backend team, processed by our dataeng team and displayed by our different frontends (do not forget this is all orchestrated by our infra team). We also talked about how that data is transformed into products, and included a discussion about some of our great partners and friends: tinybird and redpanda.

We had an amazing audience that we were lucky enough to interact with after our talk as well. Thanks to everyone who wanted to know more about what we do.

We only had 1 agenda: networking and helping contribute to the event’s success. Yes, we are hiring (like every single sponsor) but didn’t have the intent of hiring at the event specifically. We want to plant the seed inside attendees’ minds of what we do, so when they decide to look for new opportunities, they think about us. And I am sure that we succeeded in doing so.

I did also have an internal agenda, and I’ll share it with you. I wanted my team to realize that they do an amazing job, and that they should be the ones sharing it. From the feedback I received, I think they understood. Speaking in front of hundreds of people can be intimidating, but they saw people like themselves doing these presentations. I already have 2 posts from them sharing about the things they do. I am sure this will lead to more public appearances, blog posts, and more… Sharing is caring! It helps THN, but their personal brands as well.

“It was also great to see that other companies were on the same page as us, with similar challenges and very close approaches to face them. It was enriching to see that past decisions regarding our technical stack and methods (event streaming, data analytics, machine learning, deployment workflows, etc.) which drive our current solutions were also adopted in many other use cases in the industry. Exchanging this information with partners has been a valuable experience that will lead us to a wide range of tech options in the day to day.” Thoughts on the event from our colleague David Torres, tech lead at Datapull team.

“It was amazing to have the opportunity to meet new colleagues, discover many new companies (for me) that do an excellent job in their business with a great human level. Moreover, it was an honor to win the best prize of all stands, the super Lego Star Wars! We hope to see you again in the next seasons, where we may be encouraged to be the next speakers. Thank you JOTB for all the effort you made to make this event possible” According to our colleague Alex Galobart, Database Reliability Engineer.

As for the organizers: Alexandra, Luis, Pablo and the rest of the team… THANKS! The event was amazing, the organization was incredible, your partners (stands, food, etc…) were simply wonderful, and the venue facilitated many interactions… You can count on us for next year.