Expedia.com

Go Fast or Go Home: The Process of Optimizing for Client Performance

Increasingly there are a lot of signs that indicate customers hate slow pages. According to data from Google and many other sources, customers leave a page or become frustrated if loading page takes longer than about three seconds.

Advice on Freeing Features From a Monolith

It’s a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl.  Boy and girl build a service interface to help call center agents in assisting travelers with their Expedia-related travel issues.  Service grows in features over time until it’s a giant, creaking monolith that’s vital to the business.  Boy and girl decide to move to a microservice architecture to decouple themselves from the slow release cycle and annoying build times of said monolith.

Updates and Videos from re:Invent 2017

As Mark Okerstorm announced during last week’s re:Invent in Las Vegas, teams at Expedia are in the midst of migrating our travel platforms to AWS. Our teams had a busy time at re:Invent showcasing some of our work and lessons learned. In this post, I want to share highlights and videos of these sessions.

re:Invent 2017 – Building High-Performing Cloud Teams

This session is a part of the Chalk Talk series at re:Invent where presenters team up to have a slide-lite, interactive discussion with attendees.  Matt will be presenting with Ian Falconer, Engagement Manager from AWS to talk about how to optimize your teams to take full advantage of the new capabilities provided by the cloud.

re:Invent 2017 – Building a Mission Critical, Serverless Photo Pipeline for 100 Million Photos

Mike worked on HomeAway‘s image processing pipeline using Lambda functions, SNS, and DynamoDB to handle an ever growing collection of over 100 million property photos uploaded by the property owners. He’ll share the from scratch evolution of the service, walking the audience piece by piece through the overall architecture and sharing some of the key insights. You’ll learn:

Hear from the Expedia Team at re:Invent 2017

We are proud to announce this year we have 10 members of our Expedia team sharing their knowledge and learnings at Amazon’s re:Invent 2017 in December. They’ll be covering cloud topics like using AWS database services in high volume environments, using EC2 Systems Manager to build resiliency testing into a continuous integration pipeline, building high performing cloud based teams, and many other interesting topics.

Fixing Flaky Time Based Unit Tests

My name is Dan Levy and I work on our iOS team responsible for the Expedia iOS application. On our team we rely heavily on our continuous delivery pipeline to ship frequently to users, and a subset of those checks run when a pull request is created. Over the last few months many team members were experiencing random build failures due to a couple of annoying tests flapping good and bad, seemingly randomly. Flaky tests can kill the effectiveness of your pipeline so it’s a high priority to remove them. To remove these tests I followed a few steps of breaking them down, forcing them to fail reliably by inserting an artificial delay, and refactored the tests to avoid the timing issue. There are many other issues that can cause flaky tests but they are always worth investigating and solving.

Rimor – Let your tabs inspire your next vacation

I wanted to share an fun idea that my team in Chicago worked on as an extension to our Hackathon idea from June this year.