🎉trivago sponsors webpack for second year!

Last year, we had announced how excited and proud we that trivago was joining our family of supporters on Open Collective.

Throughout this year, we’ve checked in periodically with the trivago engineering team to ensure that their $120,000 investment was paying off.

We spoke with Patrick Gotthardt, who oversees all front-end engineering work at trivago, and asked him to summarize their experience sponsoring webpack this year.

“Being a data-driven company we of course also tried to collect some insights into how the sponsoring is affecting us as a company. There’s no discussion about the technical value of webpack within trivago. The work you all have done truly speaks for itself and is absolutely amazing. I can’t wait to get my hands on some of the features in Legato and to see how they’ll impact the productivity and happiness of my colleagues and how they might help us to deliver a better product for our users.

Patrick goes on to explain some of the more unique dividends they received.

But we also noticed some effect that we didn’t expect. All the public visibility you have given us lead to a situation where we suddenly became one of the most interesting companies to work for as a JavaScript developer.”

What message are sponsors sending?

When your company decides to become a sponsor for our project, your company’s logo will land both on our docs page and GitHub README. trivago, is currently our top sponsor and is now at the top of these pages. Patrick explains how valuable this becomes.

The view from webpack.js.org just below the fold, showcasing trivago as our top sponsor!

“We’ve hired a lot of really great engineers who mentioned during their job interview that our sponsoring for Webpack was one of their primary motivations for applying and we’ve since moved to a Talent Community (https://talent.trivago.com/) where people can just sign up if they're interested in working at trivago in the future and where we can match those people with the right jobs.

We wanted to make it easier to apply for a job at trivago by taking away the burden of having to look through our advertised open positions.

At Talent Community, we see that a lot of our sign-ups are coming from links on the Webpack website, Github or Medium articles. This is something we didn’t expect to happen but that is a major benefit for us as a tech company.”

Again trivago and many more sponsors listed in the same way as our docs on our GitHub README

In our eyes, when you sponsor webpack, you are making a statement that says: “We love webpack, and want people who love webpack to work for us”.

For trivago, this couldn’t have been more true. So I asked Patrick what their plans were for this year?

“I had another talk with our CTO the other day to discuss how we want to handle the Webpack sponsoring in the future. He started the discussion with announcing that we’ll continue to support the project. He also told me how happy he was with how this has worked out and that he was happy that we did it.

For us, there’s no doubt that we’ll continue supporting the Webpack community at the same rate as we’ve done so far.

We do indeed plan to support another project and I’m hoping we’ll announce that partnership soon. Our goal is always to help a project’s community and to help create a more sustainable Open Source ecosystem.”

🎉🎉 That’s right, trivago is going to continue to sponsor webpack for another year, and we, as a project, are humbled, and grateful for this opportunity. 🎉🎉

According to Patrick, this was an obvious decision for them to make. But continues to add that this is just the beginning for trivago, and hopefully other companies as well.

I think Webpack, trivago and some other companies that are also investing into Open Source communities that they rely on, are creating a new trend where eventually sponsoring will become normal. And I’m really happy that trivago is a trendsetter for this.

I don’t know of any other company where the decision to spend $120,000 on a Open Source project was made within just 5 minutes. It shows that we truly live up to our core values and that we can extend the trust we have in each other also to others in the Open Source community.

Beyond Sponsorship

One of my favorite parts about trivago, is that they go beyond simply sponsoring open source. In fact, they have an entire Open Source landing page dedicated to the projects they create, maintain, and support.

=The homepage for all of trivago’s Open Source involvement — https://tech.trivago.com/opensource/

The Power of Dividends

My favorite part about this story: It wasn’t just about the quality of webpack, or our maintenance of the project that trivago was getting in return. It was the sheer marketing value, new engineering talent, and huge developer sentiment for the company that came along for the ride. Or as I like to say “OSS Investor Dividends”. These are the really special side-effects of sponsoring projects.

“…we suddenly became one of the most interesting companies to work for as a JavaScript developer.”

Leading So Others Can Follow

We’d like to once again thank trivago for all of the incredible support they have provided, in addition to this insightful interview.

By sharing their story with us, the team expressed that they hope to have other companies and organizations realize the value and potential from becoming investors in open source projects like webpack.

No time to help contribute? Want to give back in other ways? Become a Backer or Sponsor to webpack by donating to our open collective. Open Collective not only helps support the Core Team, but also supports contributors who have spent significant time improving our organization on their free time! ❤