Meet Adrian, Principal Engineer and speaker at this years’ Devoxx London…

Come join us as we adventure around the Hotels.com global offices and meet our team to discover more about their day-to-day roles, exciting projects, great teams and, of course, their passion for travel.

Introducing Adrian, Principal Engineer..

What area of Hotels.com do you work in?

Hotels.com technology, specifically “data”.

What do you enjoy most about working at Hotels.com?

I enjoy that on the technical front we’re somewhere between the innovation of a startup and the maturity of a well established company. This means there are lots of large scale technical problems we can implement innovative solutions for.

Tell us about a project you are most proud of and why?

I’m most proud of the work I’ve taken part of to encourage more open source development inside the company. Over the past few years we’ve gone from virtually no involvement with contributing to open source to having a thriving GitHub account, many teams contributing code to our own and external projects and a culture that is really supportive of all of this.

What are you speaking about at DataWorksSummit and Devoxx? And why should people come and see your talk?

We are talking about migrating our data processing from an on premises Hadoop cluster to the cloud. We focus on the real world problems we faced around copying huge data sets into AWS and then ensuring these can be accessed and used in similar (or better) ways to how they are today. As part of this effort we built and open sourced two tools that we cover in a fair amount of detail — Circus Train (for replicating data sets) and Waggle Dance (which provides a federated metadata query layer). We also talk about some lessons learned and best practices and patterns. We hope that anyone involved in migrating “big data” to the cloud could learn from our experiences and the knowledge we share will help them if they embark on a similar journey.

How do you balance work and life?

Fortunately I work for an employer who is very understanding of the need to have a good work/life balance, particularly since I have a rather demanding 5 year old to look after! I’ve found that Hotels.com is very understanding of the need to be flexible when it comes to a typical work day as I often have to structure my time around school hours. This means I sometimes arrive late or leave early but can then make up any lost time at odd hours of the night.

What is your most memorable travel experience?

This is very hard to answer as I’m fortunate enough to have had many. I’ll talk about the one in the attached photograph. This was the surreal experience of leaving a cold, gloomy London, getting on an aeroplane and then a car and less than 18 hours later being in the blistering heat on the floor of the African rift valley in Ethiopia. It’s quite disconcerting but at the same time very exciting to be able to so completely change one’s surroundings in such a short space of time.