Join our teams

Newest posts from each category

development

Planting Bazel in barren soil: A Perl Story

A tale of how we modernized a 20 year old codebase and how Bazel helped driving it
Manuel Naranjo
Nov 22, 2023

datascience

Raising the bar by lowering the bound

Why tackling overestimation is essential for product development
Nils Skotara
Nov 1, 2023

writing

Tackling UX challenges as a team

A process for rapid group ideation
Evan Karageorgos
Aug 31, 2023

infrastructure

Reliable Operations and Rapid Development with MySQL

Businesses demand high reliability from their databases as well as rapid software development.
Nicolai Plum
Mar 30, 2023

product

How we managed to modernize the Booking.com app from the inside and out

How we managed to modernize the Booking.com app from the inside and out
Natalie Halimi
Mar 15, 2023

design

How we built our multi-platform design system at Booking.com

How we built our multi-platform design system at Booking.com
Nicole Saidy
Mar 1, 2023

Posts ordered by date

development

Planting Bazel in barren soil: A Perl Story

A tale of how we modernized a 20 year old codebase and how Bazel helped driving it
Manuel Naranjo
Nov 22, 2023

datascience

Raising the bar by lowering the bound

Why tackling overestimation is essential for product development
Nils Skotara
Nov 1, 2023

development

Measuring Technical Debt to Avoid the Boiling Frog Syndrome

source
Egor Savochkin
Sep 14, 2023

writing

Tackling UX challenges as a team

A process for rapid group ideation
Evan Karageorgos
Aug 31, 2023

datascience

How good are your ML best practices?

by George Chouliaras, Kornel Kielczewski, Amit Beka, David Konopnicki and Lucas Bernardi
George Chouliaras
Aug 23, 2023

development

Leveraging The Powers of Functional Code — Part 2

Leveraging The Powers of Functional Code — Part 2
Octavio Bokel
Aug 3, 2023

datascience

Booking.com @ KDD 2023

Booking.com contributions at the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining at Long Beach, CA…
Dima Goldenberg
Jul 31, 2023

datascience

Sequential Testing at Booking.com

Introduction
Nils Skotara
Jun 12, 2023

development

How to search point-of-interest (POI) markers on a map efficiently

How to search point-of-interest (POI) markers on a map efficiently
Igor Dotsenko
May 1, 2023

infrastructure

Reliable Operations and Rapid Development with MySQL

Businesses demand high reliability from their databases as well as rapid software development.
Nicolai Plum
Mar 30, 2023

product

How we managed to modernize the Booking.com app from the inside and out

How we managed to modernize the Booking.com app from the inside and out
Natalie Halimi
Mar 15, 2023

design

How we built our multi-platform design system at Booking.com

How we built our multi-platform design system at Booking.com
Nicole Saidy
Mar 1, 2023

writing

A successful UX leader is a creative leader

How to lead with creativity no matter your tenure, job…
Jade Goldsmith
Feb 6, 2023

infrastructure

Disaster Recovery Testing at Booking.com

At Booking.com, we have established a program to test the impact of these disasters and the recovery mechanism that we have in place.
Yoann Fouquet
Dec 15, 2022

development

Large Scale Ad Data Systems at Booking.com using the Public Cloud

Large Scale Ad Data Systems at Booking.com using the Public Cloud
Warren Qi
Dec 2, 2022

development

Write tests smarter, not harder

Chasing what is measurable, might actually be harming achieving the…
Maxim Schepelin
Nov 16, 2022

development

Scaling our customer review system for peak traffic

Scaling our customer review system for peak traffic
Benjamin Hiltpolt
Nov 8, 2022

design

Driving the product development process as a UXer

Driving the product development process as a UXer
Rianne Links
Oct 25, 2022

development

Improving GraphQL Federation Resiliency

Improving GraphQL Federation Resiliency: Investigating Failed Schema Updates
Christian Ernst
Oct 24, 2022

development

Building Properties with AWS Step Functions

Developers love new technologies and are always eager to try things hands on. As a…
Mohamed Elsaka
Oct 18, 2022

development

Leveraging the powers of functional code

How to say more, while writing less!
Octavio Bokel
Sep 27, 2022

datascience

Booking.com @ RecSys 2022

Booking.com’s publications at the 16th ACM conference on Recommender Systems
Felipe Moraes
Sep 5, 2022

datascience

How to stop wasting time fixing broken machine learning pipelines

How to stop wasting time fixing broken machine learning pipelines
Carlo Provinciali
Aug 8, 2022

datascience

Encouraged to comply

Improving bounds with Instrumental Variables
Nils Skotara
Aug 4, 2022

infrastructure

MySQL at Scale: Booking MariaDB to MySQL Migration

Booking has one of the largest #MySQL deployments in the world. Operating thousands of servers is not trivial. To perform #database upgrades and migrations in an environment like this requires careful planning and can take weeks or months.
Mohammed Gaafar
July 25, 2022

infrastructure

MySQL backups at Booking.com

Business data needs backups, and backups at scale come with many challenges. We will tell you about the challenges we faced and the solutions we implemented.
Nicolai Plum
July 25, 2022

datascience

Term Structure of Bookings

An offbeat modeling application that analogises yield curves of bonds at…
Roopanjali Jasrotia
Jul 20, 2022

infrastructure

Using Terraform Enterprise to Support 3000 Users at Booking.com

Learn how Booking.com leverages HashiCorp Terraform Enteprise to support 3,000 active development users on its private cloud.
Woody Christy
July 7, 2022

datascience

Partial Blockout Experiments for a Two Sided Marketplace

Experimenting on both sides of the…
Sam Bailey
Jun 1, 2022

product

From ideation to production in 3 steps -

A case study on how we built our first Content Machine Learning platform at Booking.com
Hadas Harush
May 18, 2022

datascience

Overtracking and trigger analysis: how to reduce sample sizes and INCREASE the sensitivity of…

Overtracking and trigger analysis: how to reduce sample sizes and INCREASE the sensitivity of
Pablo Estevez
Apr 20, 2022

product

Introducing Voice Search Experience at Booking.com

Introducing Voice Search Experience at Booking.com
Noa Barbiro
Apr 5, 2022

development

Object equality in Java and Kotlin

Introduction
Efstathios Mertikas
Mar 30, 2022

writing

What we do is much more than just writing

How to thrive as a non-native UX Writer
Susanna Agababyan
Mar 21, 2022

product

Be a PM for a Hackathon Project

Hackathons are very common events in the tech industry to foster innovation, and at Booking.com we have…
Can Ülker
Mar 15, 2022

design

How to get hired as a Designer at Booking.com

How to prepare for a design interview at Booking.com or……
Roberta Virzì
Jan 18, 2022

datascience

A/B/n testing with control in the presence of subpopulations

Link to paper
Christina Katsimerou
Dec 13, 2021

writing

Moving on from contract work to in-house UX writing

A UX writer’s first 3 months in a permanent role
Nerie Ohana
Dec 6, 2021

datascience

A Quality Model for Machine Learning Systems

by George Chouliaras, Kornel Kielczewski, Amit Beka and Lucas Bernardi
George Chouliaras
Nov 30, 2021

development

Rendering performance monitoring on Android

As developers, we always want our apps to offer the best user experience. When it…
Artem Grishin
Nov 10, 2021

datascience

Machine Learning for Fraud Detection in E-Commerce: A Research Agenda

Published in: (2021) Machine Learning for Fraud Detection in E-Commerce: A Research Agenda. In: Wang G., Ciptadi A., Ahmadzadeh A. (eds) Deployable Machine Learning for Security Defense. MLHat 2021…
Kees Jan de Vries
Nov 4, 2021

datascience

Multi-Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation Through Multidimensional Tagging

Multi-Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation Through Multidimensional Tagging
Satendra Kumar
Nov 1, 2021

infrastructure

Nanotube: High-performance metrics router

We will discuss how we solve the problem of putting down tens of millions of metric data points per second. We will cover the design, how we achieve resiliency, and manage high loads on hundreds of boxes.
Roman Grytskiv
Oct 14, 2021

product

Why and how we built a Messaging API Product for Partners

Why and how we built a Messaging API Product for Partners
Sidhartha Guru
Oct 6, 2021

datascience

Booking.com @ RecSys 2021

Booking.com’s publications at the 15th ACM conference on Recommender Systems
Maayan Kafry
Sep 23, 2021

datascience

Leveraging proxy variables for causal inference

Leveraging proxy variables for causal inference
Christina Katsimerou
Jun 24, 2021

product

A new PM(ommy) is born: How my experience as a PM helped me with my new baby girl

A new PM(ommy) is born: How my experience as a PM helped me with my new baby girl
Hadas Harush
Jun 13, 2021

development

How do thread priorities affect your Android app?

Introduction
Efstathios Mertikas
May 18, 2021

product

Why we use experimentation quality as the main KPI for our experimentation platform

Why we use experimentation quality as the main KPI for our experimentation platform
Christophe Perrin
May 12, 2021

product

Multiplication instead of division

Research and experimentation are the “peanut butter and jelly” of…
Lukas Vermeer
May 6, 2021

datascience

Mining the Stars: Learning Quality Ratings with User-facing Explanations for Vacation Rentals

Paper
Lucas Bernardi
Mar 23, 2021

design

How we created the illustration style for our traveller products

How we created the illustration style for our traveller products
Booking.com
Mar 1, 2021

datascience

Personalization in Practice

Methods and Applications — a WSDM ’21 Tutorial
Dima Goldenberg
Feb 26, 2021

datascience

Uplift Modeling

From Causal Inference to Personalization — Tutorial
Dima Goldenberg
Feb 26, 2021

writing

When UX Writing meets Machine Learning

Helping people understand positives and negatives in reviews by…
Serena Giust
Jan 27, 2021

product

It takes a Flywheel to Fly

Kickstarting and keeping the A/B testing momentum
Lukas Vermeer
Jan 1, 2021

datascience

There’s more to experimentation than A/B

Scaling up non-randomised experiments
Christina Katsimerou
Dec 16, 2020

datascience

Booking.com WSDM WebTour 2021 Data Challenge

Booking.com sponsors the ACM WSDM WebTour 2021 Challenge…
Dima Goldenberg
Dec 14, 2020

development

Booking’s Journey with Brotli

The challenges of improving performance in a complex environment
Mark Zabaro
Dec 10, 2020

design

Design sprint tips from 7 facilitators at Booking.com

Design sprint tips from 7 facilitators at Booking.com
Robbie Farrell
Dec 7, 2020

datascience

A fundamental problem of hypothesis testing with finite inventory in e-commerce

Published in Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry by Dennis Bohle, Alexander Marynych, Matthias Meiners
Booking.com Data Science
Oct 29, 2020

datascience

Recommending Accommodation Filters with Online Learning

Presented in the Workshop on Online Recommender Systems and User Modeling ORSUM ACM RecSys 2020 by Lucas Bernardi, Pablo Estevez, Matias Eidis and Eqbal Osama
Booking.com Data Science
Oct 1, 2020

design

How we created the illustration style for our partner products

How we created the illustration style for our partner products
Booking.com
Sep 29, 2020

datascience

Beyond algorithms: Ranking at scale at Booking.com

Paper: http://www.toinebogers.com/workshops/complexrec2020/Mavridis.pdf
Booking.com Data Science
Sep 24, 2020

datascience

Free Lunch!

Published in Recsys 2020, by Dima Goldenberg, Javier Albert, Pablo Estevez and Lucas Bernardi.
Pablo Estevez
Aug 28, 2020

datascience

Efficient Image Gallery Representations at Scale Through Multi-Task Learning

Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3397271.3401433
Booking.com Data Science
Jul 28, 2020

datascience

Increasing sensitivity of experiments with the rank transformation

Increasing the sensitivity of experiments with rank transformation
Lin Jia
Jul 23, 2020

writing

Why you should want your localisation team to change your copy

Why you should want your localisation team to change your copy
Ayelet Kessel
Jun 30, 2020

development

Maximizing OkHttp connection reuse

Introduction
Diego Gómez Olvera
Jun 3, 2020

writing

A new name won’t fix your product

Why product names matter but user experience and understanding…
Jade Goldsmith
May 27, 2020

writing

Taking the leap with copy

The role of copywriting in big leap product launches, from when not to…
Sofia Tiira
May 13, 2020

product

Year in Search: 2019

As we kick off the start of a new year (and decade), the Booking.com Search team has taken a look back at 2019’s…
Suryansh Tibarewala
Jan 28, 2020

writing

How to respect customers in the new digital era: A case study in UX writing and machine learning

How to respect customers in the new digital era: A case study in UX writing and machine learning
Teri Hason
Jan 20, 2020

infrastructure

BEAM-style Execution Tracing for Perl

Let's dig into the BEAM's execution tracing implementation, learn how it works, and look at what it takes to port this great idea to a much more traditional language runtime, like Perl.
Ben Tyler
Dec 29, 2019

product

Personalization Using Machine Learning — From Data Science to User Experience

Personalization Using Machine Learning — From Data Science to User Experience
Anat Kalinski
Dec 17, 2019

writing

What can Dungeons & Dragons teach us about User Experience?

Yes this is a post about the game of D&D…
Andrew Matthews
Dec 2, 2019

product

Dating a hotel? How we created a personalized “Match Score” for accommodation

Dating a hotel? How we created a personalized “Match Score” for accommodation
Hadas Harush
Nov 20, 2019

infrastructure

Scaling the Edge

Our Global Traffic Distribution team is tasked with developing, scaling, and maintaining the load balancing infrastructure for business-critical systems. Here is how we use HAProxy at scale to achieve the best reliability.
Marcin Deranek
Nov 12, 2019

infrastructure

SLOs for Data-Intensive Services

We will go through our journey towards defining a monitoring process for our services at Booking.com, from ineffective availability/latency SLOs to the current setup and all its advantages
Yoann Fouquet
Oct 31, 2019

datascience

Machine Learning in production: the Booking.com approach

Machine Learning in production: the Booking.com approach
Lucas Bernardi
Oct 29, 2019

writing

Responsible UX writing for machine learning

What you can learn from my experience at Booking.com
Tanja Matic
Oct 24, 2019

datascience

Cross-lingual intent classification in a low resource industrial setting

Published in EMNLP 2019 by Talaat Khalil, Kornel Kielczewski, George Chouliaras, Amina Keldibek and Maarten Versteegh
Booking.com Data Science
Oct 18, 2019

datascience

PyData Amsterdam 2019 at Booking.com:

PyData Amsterdam 2019 at Booking.com: Causal Inference, Transfer Learning for Machine Translation, and Annotating…
Melanie Mueller
Sep 10, 2019

design

What we learned onboarding 2 million home and apartment owners on Booking.com

What we learned onboarding 2 million home and apartment owners on Booking.com
Alex Muñoz
Sep 3, 2019

datascience

Semi-supervised learning to improve translation of guest reviews

Semi-supervised learning to improve translation of guest reviews
Booking.com
Sep 3, 2019

datascience

Combining Context Features in Sequence-Aware Recommender Systems

presented in RecSys 2019 Late-breaking Results, 16th-20th September 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark by Sarai Mizrachi and Pavel Levin
Booking.com Data Science
Aug 28, 2019

datascience

150 Successful Machine Learning Models: 6 Lessons Learned at Booking.com

Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3292500.3330744
Booking.com Data Science
Aug 12, 2019

datascience

Understanding Mechanisms of Change in Online Experiments at Booking.com

Mediation Analysis to…
Booking.com
Jul 16, 2019

product

3 cognitive biases Product Managers should be mindful of

And how to avoid them
Dianthe van Velzen
Jul 15, 2019

product

Improving our agile process leveraging Jira boards and flows

Improving our agile process leveraging Jira boards and flows
Dor Tal
Jun 26, 2019

design

Prototyping Booking.com’s Chatbot for Better Conversations

Prototyping Booking.com’s Chatbot for Better Conversations
Booking.com
Jun 24, 2019

infrastructure

Lifecycle of a kubectl Command: Harden Kubernetes Setup with Automation

In this talk, you will see how we at Booking.com have achieved the aforementioned features in a fully automated fashion with zero human intervention involved.
Sanjary Rahman
May 23, 2019

writing

How minimalism made me a decent copywriter

And the work it takes to make things simple
Francesca Catanuso
May 13, 2019

product

Behind the buzzwords: how we build ML products at Booking.com

Behind the buzzwords: how we build ML products at Booking.com
Hadas Harush
Apr 11, 2019

design

Lessons learned building a design system at scale

How we built the Booking Design System (and how you…
Arda Karacizmeli
Mar 25, 2019

infrastructure

How Reliability and Product Teams Collaborate at Booking.com

How Reliability and Product Teams Collaborate at Booking.com
Emmanuel Goossaert
Feb 28, 2019

writing

Testing your copy for the price of a coffee

4 tips and 1 warning
Tanja Matic
Feb 25, 2019

design

Empowering Data with Design

Data can be just a bunch of numbers without a clear meaning or it can be a…
Booking.com
Feb 25, 2019

development

Moving fast, breaking things, and fixing them as quickly as possible

How we use online controlled…
Lukas Vermeer
Feb 21, 2019

datascience

Leaky Abstractions In Online Experimentation Platforms

Experimental design details that online…
Booking.com
Jan 9, 2019

writing

Writing accessible copy at Booking.com

Joining Booking.com in September 2017 started the biggest and…
Clare Wilson
Jan 7, 2019

product

How can AI help people make better decisions?

Machine Translation of Reviews in Booking.com.
Sathish Chander
Dec 13, 2018

infrastructure

Introducing Shipper

Customizable multi-cluster rollouts for Kubernetes
Ben Tyler
Dec 10, 2018

product

It’s not all about numbers: how we use research in product development @Booking.com

It’s not all about numbers: how we use research in product development @Booking.com
Booking.com
Nov 19, 2018

datascience

Mediation Analysis in Online Experiments at Booking.com: Disentangling Direct and Indirect Effects

Published in CODE 2018 by Tolga Oztan, Zoé van Havre, Caio Gomes, Lukas Vermeer
Booking.com Data Science
Nov 1, 2018

product

Why nobody cares about your “two cents”

“My two cents” is now a common phrase in many workplaces, used when someone wants to make…
Carlos Paz
Oct 22, 2018

product

Design Thinking for Machine Learning

Or How to Build Products with a Giant Probability Calculator
Pranav Pathak
Oct 22, 2018

product

Lessons learned from working in an A.I. first approach for product development

Lessons learned from working in an A.I. first approach for product development
Booking.com
Oct 22, 2018

design

Designing a Brand for a One-day Event: design systems, hard decisions and avoiding certain doom

Designing a Brand for a One-day Event: design systems, hard decisions and avoiding certain doom
Booking.com
Oct 3, 2018

writing

8 steps to a UX copy strategy that rocks

Align what you write with your product vision and company…
Jade Goldsmith
Sep 21, 2018

design

Using storyboards to get people engaged with your product

Using storyboards to get people engaged with your product
Booking.com
Aug 29, 2018

writing

A/B tests and copy — what, why, how

A/B testing. It’s one of the things Booking.com has built its reputation on, and it’s a huge part of the day-to-day job of anyone who works in the Tech department.
Rachael Bundock
Aug 6, 2018

datascience

Data Science meets Python at Booking.com: PyData Amsterdam 2018

We did it again! After last year’s…
Melanie Mueller
Jul 30, 2018

datascience

Crunching big data with 4 machine learning libraries

Crunching big data with 4 machine learning libraries
Antonio Castelli
Jul 12, 2018

datascience

Learning to Match

Booking.com is a virtual two-sided marketplace where guests and accommodation providers are the two distinct stakeholders. They…
Booking.com Data Science
Jun 14, 2018

datascience

Democratizing online controlled experiments at Booking.com

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08217
Booking.com Data Science
Jun 14, 2018

datascience

Where to Go on Your Next Trip? Optimizing Travel Destinations Based on User Preferences

Published in SIGIR 2015 by Julia Kiseleva, Melanie Mueller, Lucas Bernardi, Chad Davis, Ivan Kovacek, Mats Einarsen, Jaap Kamps, Alexander Tuzhilin and Djoerd Hiemstra
Booking.com Data Science
Jun 14, 2018

datascience

The Continuous Cold Start Problem in e-Commerce Recommender Systems

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.01177.pdf
Booking.com Data Science
Jun 14, 2018

datascience

User Engagement through Topic Modelling in Travel

Paper: http://www.ueo-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/noulasKDD2014.pdf
Booking.com Data Science
Jun 14, 2018

writing

Minimum Viable Pizzas

Crafting words for New Product Development at Booking.com
Francesca Catanuso
Jun 13, 2018

design

Success is a marathon, not a sprint

Are you planning a trip soon? Maybe a beach trip for the summer? Backpacking through Indonesia? Or perhaps a city trip to get some awesome shots with that new camera? Whatever you’re…
Booking.com
Jun 7, 2018

infrastructure

Linux Kernel bug hunting

The story starts with a message on our workplace chat:
Pavlos Parissis
May 25, 2018

writing

Don’t tell me what I can’t do

Building the right kind of feedback culture for UX Copywriters
Steven Baguley
May 23, 2018

infrastructure

Introducing Envoy-Based Service Mesh at Booking.com

In this talk, we'll go deep into Booking.com's case study of introducing service mesh. We will discover the reasons and objectives of the project.
Ivan Kruglov
May 04, 2018

writing

Why we built a design tool for copywriters

An introduction to Kopie
Booking.com
Apr 25, 2018

writing

How we’re building a chatbot that does more than just talk

Serial skim-readers, user research, and a robot that just wants to help
Kathy Saunders
Apr 11, 2018

writing

Writing with variables at Booking.com

How to write to infinity with the building blocks of language.
Steven Baguley
Apr 4, 2018

writing

Writing UX copy for translation

How to write your way in and out of translation issues, one language at a time
Rachael Bundock
Mar 14, 2018

writing

A day in the life of a Language Specialist

When I joined Booking.com from the NGO/Media sector, I did not have much knowledge about business terminology, and in particular, the Booking.com vocabulary was quite uncharted…
Tanja Matic
Feb 19, 2018

writing

Building the future of copywriting

Experimentation. Data-driven strategy. Translations at scale.
Marly Pierre-Louis
Feb 12, 2018

writing

Bringing words to life at Booking.com

Booking.com is a vast, global company made up of more than 15,000 human beings — we all have unique experiences and passions. That’s pretty wonderful, and powerful. Writing for us is…
Kelly Chambers
Feb 12, 2018

design

Informed by data, driven by empathy: an introduction to user experience research at Booking.com

If you know anything about the way we design at Booking.com it’s probably how much A/B testing we do. And it’s true: everything goes…
Booking.com
Feb 5, 2018

datascience

How Booking.com increases the power of online experiments with CUPED

How Booking.com increases the power of online experiments with CUPED
Simon Jackson
Jan 22, 2018

datascience

Don’t be tricked by the Hashing Trick

In Machine Learning, the Hashing Trick is a technique to encode categorical features. It’s been gaining popularity lately after being adopted by libraries like Vowpal Wabbit and Tensorflow (where it plays a key role) and others like sklearn, where support is…
Lucas Bernardi
Jan 10, 2018

design

20 Mistakes to Avoid When Applying For A Job As A Designer (or, A Personal Journey Through 1,000…

20 Mistakes to Avoid When Applying For A Job As A Designer (or, A Personal Journey Through 1,000 CVs)
Matthew Pennell
Dec 13, 2017

infrastructure

Incidents, fixes, and the day after

Incidents are like presents: You love them as long as you don’t…
Stefano Baccianella
Dec 4, 2017

design

Designing a service chatbot

I recently came back from ChatbotConf 2017, and one of the interesting things I noticed was just how many…
Sachin Honap
Nov 21, 2017

design

How we adapted the Booking.com mobile site for the iPhone X notch.

When Apple announced the launch of their latest flagship handset, the iPhone X, they promised it would set a new benchmark for mobile…
Mark Unthank
Nov 7, 2017

design

Inside Booking.com Design: Lucas Mourelle

Welcome to “Inside Booking.com Design”, our interview series where we put our design team in the spotlight and share some of the secrets of the people…
Andy Warburton
Oct 19, 2017

design

7 things you need to know about designing a chat bot

7 things you need to know about designing a chatbot
James Butler
Oct 9, 2017

development

Avoiding phase transitions in server configuration

It’s a well-known trope that if your code doesn’t run, it probably doesn’t work. This is particularly true of error handling, error recovery and…
Timo Kluck
Sep 20, 2017

datascience

Automated image tagging at Booking.com

Abstract: Understanding the content of an image is a reasonably easy task — at least for us…
Emrah Tasli
Aug 10, 2017

datascience

PyData at Booking.com: Deep Learning, Statistical Models and NLP

In April, Booking.com hosted PyData Amsterdam 2017. The Booking.com headquarters was filled with 330 Python developers and data scientists from all over…
Melanie Mueller
Jun 27, 2017

development

An unconventional way of learning a new programming language

There are more than 500 programming languages, and it’s likely you want to start learning a new one today. You might know C++ and Java, but at…
Sahil Dua
Apr 15, 2017

infrastructure

Troubleshooting: A journey into the unknown

Troubleshooting is a journey. It’s a long, unpredictable trek, one where you know the start and the end points but have zero knowledge about the actual path you…
Pavlos Parissis
Apr 14, 2017

design

Building A Testing Culture

Booking.com’s Director of Design, Stuart Frisby, shared what we have learned…
Matthew Pennell
Apr 4, 2017

design

Implementing system fonts on Booking.com — A lesson learned.

Inspired by the recent work that Github…
Stuart Frisby
Mar 29, 2017

design

The importance of feedback

On a regular day at Booking.com I will probably interact with 40–50 people. The interactions can be discussions around hypotheses for experimentation, brainstorming, experiment ideas, but mostly around providing and receiving design feedback.
Tomasz Pieta
Mar 15, 2017

design

End-to-end product thinking: How Booking.com designs for partners

At Booking.com, we’re pretty well known for our A/B testing and guest-facing platforms, helping millions of people each day to find and…
James Butler
Feb 27, 2017

design

Maja and Kit’s Winter Adventures

Take a peek into Booking.com Design Principles through Maja and Kit’s…
Polina Skaia
Feb 1, 2017

development

Using Riak as Events Storage — Part 4

We saw in the previous parts of this blog series how to gather, aggregate and store events in Riak, and how to fetch them for external processing. In this post, we'll…
Damien "dams" Krotkine
Jan 11, 2017

design

Design Critique — The Booking way

It’s Thursday afternoon. For two hours, a group of designers from different teams at Booking.com get…
Richard Rio Omolo
Dec 19, 2016

datascience

Named Entity Classification

Abstract: The customers of Booking.com communicate with us through different mediums. They perform queries on our search engine, provide us with reviews about their stay and describe their opinion about different destinations. All this communication creates an abundance of…
Themis Mavridis
Dec 16, 2016

design

Inside Booking.com Design: Zania Barnum

Welcome to “Inside Booking.com Design”, our new interview series where we put our design team in the spotlight and share some of the secrets of the people…
Andy Warburton
Dec 13, 2016

design

5 ways to listen to your customers

One of our most valued principles at Booking.com is putting the customer at the center of…
Tomasz Pieta
Oct 24, 2016

infrastructure

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 4, Annex: Under the Hood

This is the annex to Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 4: More Benchmarks in Production.
Jean-François Gagné
Sep 27, 2016

infrastructure

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 4: More Benchmarks in Production

Parallel replication is a highly-expected feature of MySQL available in MariaDB 10.0 and in MySQL 5.7. We already presented…
Jean-François Gagné
Sep 27, 2016

datascience

k-Nearest Neighbours: From slow to fast thanks to maths

Abstract: Building the best travel experience for our customers in Booking.com often involves solving very challenging problems. One that appears very frequently is the k-Nearest Neighbours problem (k-NN). In simple words it can be…
Lucas Bernardi
Aug 31, 2016

development

Taming the events: How we regained petabyte-scale Hive query power

In the beginning, four long years ago, simply having every data set in Hadoop was good enough. We were taking baby steps into the big…
booking.development
Jul 18, 2016

design

Beneath the Surface: UX at Booking.com

On April 21st we hosted an event to show our passion for User Experience here at…
Maria Lígia Klokner
Jun 15, 2016

development

A Few Fun Tools We Built At Booking.com

Everyone who starts working at Booking.com gets the technology talk. “We don’t want to hold you back,” they say. “We don’t want to restrict your creativity. You’re…
Matthew Pennell
Jun 6, 2016

development

Perl IntelliJ Plugin — Herd your code

Development and navigation in a large codebase can prove quite the challenge. A common tool when tackling such a large codebase is an Integrated Development…
Eli Abramovitch
May 26, 2016

development

Progressive Web Apps with Service Workers

In this post we will discuss Progressive Web Apps and Service Workers. How can they help modern-day mobile web users, and how are we experimenting with them at…
Jesse Yang
Apr 21, 2016

development

Using Riak as Events Storage — Part 3

In this post, we’ll see how to apply transformations to the events data stored in Riak without the data leaving the cluster. We saw in the previous parts how to…
Damien "dams" Krotkine
Mar 2, 2016

datascience

Using multivariant tests to determine performance impact

When we introduce new features on our website, sometimes it’s not simply the behaviour of our users that changes. The behaviour of our own systems can change, too.
Booking.com
Feb 23, 2016

development

Using Riak as Events Storage — Part 2

In this post, we’ll see how to push data to Riak, how to read it later on, and how to perform data processing out of Riak. As a reminder, we saw in the previous part…
Damien "dams" Krotkine
Nov 24, 2015

design

Changing our attitude towards failure

Are you afraid to have your designs critiqued? If so you’re not…
Booking.com
Oct 30, 2015

development

Using Riak as Events Storage — Part 1

Booking.com constantly monitors, inspects, and analyzes our systems in order to make decisions. We capture and channel events from our various subsystems, then…
Damien "dams" Krotkine
Oct 19, 2015

design

How we designed Booking.com for Business

When we set out to build Booking.com for Business, it immediately felt like we were in a…
Booking.com
Sep 21, 2015

design

A/B Testing: Concept != Execution

“We tested that, and it failed.”
Erin Weigel
Sep 21, 2015

design

Would you like fries with that?

Discussing the Hamburger Icon.
Booking.com
Sep 21, 2015

design

Goldilocks and the Three Experiments

Once upon a time, during a usability test in a low and Nether-land, a seemingly meaningless…
Erin Weigel
Sep 21, 2015

design

Automating CSS Sprites for Large Organisations

CSS sprites have come a long way in the ten years since Dave Shea first wrote…
Matthew Pennell
Sep 21, 2015

design

Responsive email

In the last few years the number of people who read our emails on mobile devices has increased rapidly and with that we turned…
Booking.com
Sep 21, 2015

infrastructure

Abstracting Binlog Servers and MySQL Master Promotion without Reconfiguring all Slaves

In a MySQL replication deployment, the master is a single point of failure. To recover after the failure of this…
Jean-François Gagné
Sep 9, 2015

infrastructure

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 3, Annex: Under the Hood

This is the annex to Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 3: Benchmarks in Production.
Jean-François Gagné
Jul 22, 2015

infrastructure

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 3: Benchmarks in Production

Parallel replication is a much-expected feature of MySQL. It is available in MariaDB 10.0 and in MySQL 5.7. In this 3rd post of the…
Jean-François Gagné
Jul 22, 2015

development

How We Spent Two Days Making Perl Faster

This is a story about a significant new optimization to the Perl interpreter. It is a story about battling code complexity. And it is a story about wanting to have…
booking.development
May 22, 2015

design

A year working as a designer at Booking.com

Lessons learned from this past year working as a designer…
Booking.com
Apr 16, 2015

infrastructure

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 2: Slave Group Commit

(The previous post, Better Parallel Replication for MySQL, is Part 1 of the series.) Parallel replication is a much expected feature of…
Jean-François Gagné
Mar 31, 2015

infrastructure

Better Parallel Replication for MySQL

Parallel replication is a much-expected feature of MySQL. It’s available in MariaDB 10.0 and in MySQL 5.7. Yet, both lose efficiency when replicating through…
Jean-François Gagné
Mar 13, 2015

development

IO::Socket::Timeout: socket timeout made easy

Without network operations, running a website for booking accommodation online would be nearly impossible. Network operations can be anything from simple…
Damien "dams" Krotkine
Feb 26, 2015

development

Distributed Top-N Similarity Join with Hive and Perl

At Booking.com we have a lot of data to manage. Most of the time MySQL does the job, but for very large datasets and heavy analytics we use Hadoop and…
Bosko Devetak
Jan 5, 2015

infrastructure

Better Crash-safe replication for MySQL

At Booking.com, we use MySQL replication extensively for read scaling. However, because we have so many slaves (we have thousands), sooner or later, one of them…
Jean-François Gagné
Oct 22, 2014

development

Reusing Bitmap objects on Android

Memory management in Android can be a bit complicated if the application has heavy media demands. The Booking.com Android application had an issue explicitly dealing with…
booking.development
Aug 8, 2014

infrastructure

MySQL Slave Scaling (and more)

At Booking.com, we have very wide replication topologies. It is not uncommon to have more than fifty (and sometimes more than a hundred) slaves replicating from the same…
Jean-François Gagné
Jul 15, 2014

development

More Optimizations in Perl 5.20-to-be

In a recent post on his blog Matthew Horsfall explained a few of the optimizations to Perl that he contributed recently. On this site, we reported on the fantastic…
booking.development
May 16, 2014

infrastructure

MySQL 5.6 GTIDs: Evaluation and Online Migration

At Booking.com, we use MySQL to operate our web site where tens of million of pages are viewed and over 625,000 room nights are reserved every day. This…
Jean-François Gagné
Mar 26, 2014

development

A Faster Perl Runtime in Tiny Steps

Booking.com uses the Perl programming language heavily across its entire technical infrastructure. At the size of our infrastructure, even small performance…
booking.development
Mar 14, 2014

development

Custom Browser Extensions for Front End Developers

Booking.com is displayed in dozens languages all over the world. We also support over fifty currencies. You can browse prices on our site in either the…
Deepak Gulati
Jan 30, 2014

development

Native Extensions for Perl without Smoke and Mirrors

The standard mechanism by which one can hook native extensions into Perl, dubbed XS for “eXternal Subroutine”, is often criticized for its arcane…
booking.development
Dec 15, 2013

development

Hardening Perl’s Hash Function

In 2003 the Perl development community was made aware of an algorithmic complexity attack on the Perl’s hash table implementation[1]. This attack was similar to reports over…
booking.development
Nov 6, 2013

development

The Next Sereal is Coming!

Sereal is a fast, compact, binary, schema-less serialization format that aims at dynamic languages’ data structures and specifically supports many of Perl’s complex structures…
booking.development
Sep 5, 2013

development

The Dreaded “Attempt to free unreferenced scalar”

Every single time I see an error message that looks like Attempt to free unreferenced scalar: SV 0xDEADBEEF, my heart sinks. I know that I am in for an…
booking.development
Jun 21, 2013

development

Profiling in Production

At Booking.com, we’re big fans of monitoring. With the usual battery of system-level monitors, we keep an eye on the health of our servers. As you would expect from any commercial…
Rafaël Garcia-Suarez
May 1, 2013

datascience

Is your A/B testing effort just chasing statistical ghosts?

Controlling for repeated significance testing errors and false positive rates in commercial A/B testing is often perceived as a bit of a pedantic, academic exercise.
Booking.com
Apr 19, 2013

infrastructure

Dotfiles distribution

When faced with managing dozens of servers, keeping your configuration files up to date (or existent) becomes a real chore.
Vedran Mikulic
Apr 10, 2013

infrastructure

F5 BIG-IP Custom MIB

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is an internet protocol used to monitor and manage devices including servers, routers, switches and assorted other devices. It allows…
Robert Sutcliffe
Mar 11, 2013

development

Writing Advanced Daemons That Aren’t Daemons

This is the second and final article in a set of two. The first covered a pluggable locking toolkit. Here, we’ll explore more advanced patterns. At…
booking.development
Feb 25, 2013

development

Highlander!

There can be only one! Referring to the one process doing a particular job at a time, of course.
booking.development
Feb 18, 2013

development

Protect Against Accidental Logging of Sensitive Information

This article introduces a novel way of handling sensitive data in the structural part of a Perl web application. Quite clearly, it does not…
booking.development
Jan 2, 2013

development

Efficient CSS Compression in Perl

At Booking.com we use Yahoo’s YUICompressor to minify our style sheet and JavaScript files. We do this automatically from Perl for a smooth development experience.
Simon Bertrang
Dec 14, 2012

development

Sereal — a binary data serialization format

We introduce Sereal, a new, binary data serialization format that provides high-performance, schema-less serialization for Perl and other languages.
booking.development
Nov 13, 2012

development

The Signal Handling Blues

Unix/POSIX signal handling is tricky at best of times. At worst, it drives people to write articles about it.
booking.development
Nov 2, 2012
Press and media Privacy & cookies
Join our teams Visit Booking.com
© 2023 Booking.com