A Refactoring Tale

Very frequently, refactoring starts the same way. One engineer learns/thinks about something. A (naive) prototype gets built. It is demoed, presented to a few people. A pull request is created, updated and merged. Et voilà, all your problems will be solved by this miraculous new code ...

True to their website claims, Hipmunk delivered delight from Day One for me when I was hired to be the newest engineer on the Platform team. My arrival time was arranged well before my start date and instructions for whom to meet where were precisely planned. I received a boisterous ...

Hipmunk’s hotel filters got a facelift in a recent Android update. In this post, I’m going to describe what changed, and walk through the Android fundamentals of implementing the price histogram filter.

The goal of the redesign was to add new features and to modernize the look and ...

“Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Hipmunk's Hello Hipmunk chatbot provides personalized travel suggestions to users, helping ...

Foo Week VI

Here are some of the best projects from our most recent Foo Week.

Chippy Frontpage Animation
by Eric Krueger

Using Spine and WebGL, Eric rigged up a model of our mascot, Chippy, and animated him to pop up on our frontpage. That's a friendly Hipmunk welcome ...

At Hipmunk, we have dozens of flight and hotel API integrations with our partners. Each one of those integrations is a microservice, which abstracts away the details of fetching and sanitizing the data. We have been writing even more microservices as our infrastructure gets more developed - things like the Circuit ...

Hipmunk is all about discovering a better travel experience, and that requires knowing the alternatives. So each night, Hipmunk conducts proactive searches of a little over 100 million possible trips, which are then placed in a database called the fare cache.

The fare cache allows a travel search to easily ...

Foo Week V

Here are some of the best projects from our most recent Foo Week.

Chippy Canvas Animations
by Eric Krueger

Using Spine and WebGL, Eric created a canvas animation of our famed mascot, Chippy. This new animation is silky smooth and you can even change ...

We live in an ever-evolving universe where the only constant is change. We at Hipmunk are especially sensitive to this fact of life. As a meta-search site for flights, hotels, cars and packages, the successful functioning of our site relies on the success rates of our API calls to our ...

The Problem

When you search for hotels on Hipmunk, we search dozens of partner APIs and merge the results so you can easily compare rates and find the best one. For example, if you're visiting San Francisco and want to stay at the Hotel Kabuki, we'll show you ...

When Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Skype announced availability of chat APIs last year, we were excited to bring our Hello Hipmunk travel assistant - which was previously only available through email - to the users of these messaging products. However, as we started adding support for these new APIs to our chatbot ...

Code reviews are an important part of developing reliable software. Reviewers not only need to make sure that the proposed code changes make sense and meet code style guidelines; but also work as intended. Cloning the pull request branch for testing often means stashing work in progress on a different ...

I went to Droidcon last month!

Italian lesson:

Graudle

Linkadin

hot

caldo (remember this!)

Droidcon 2017 in Torino, Italy

Here’s the blitz: the speakers hailed from all around Europe, most commonly Germany, Spain, France, Britain, and, of course, Italy. There was a good number of speakers who came from ...

Foo Week IV

Here are some of the best projects from our fourth Foo Week.

Custom Agony
Chris Beacham, Bryan Kaplan, and Manuel Sanchez

Hipmunk is known for the unique way in which it sorts its flight results, by agony. Agony is determined by combination of price, number of stops ...

1. Meetings must have a stated purpose

Meetings need a clear purpose to keep them on track and not waste people's time. What are we trying to get out of this meeting? When the purpose is reached, the meeting can end. Meetings should end with clear takeaways and next ...

Every engineer at Hipmunk can deploy code to production. This hasn't always been the case and enabling it required us to overhaul our deploy system to be safe and easy to use. The new system has been in production for just over a year now.

A Bit of History ...

At Hipmunk we prefer to use "boring" technology. We'll take the tried and true, battle-tested tech over the current flavor of the month any day. We strive to punch above our weight and one of our biggest challenges is doing the most we can with the small, high caliber ...

The best cultures are formed organically by having like-minded people come together with a common purpose. A healthy engineering culture can't be forced but it can be shaped with time and commitment.

At Hipmunk:

• We want to enable our engineers to do their best work.
• We want to keep ...

At Hipmunk, we believe that the key to developing a world-class product and team is by fostering innovation and enabling continuous education. One way we encourage that is through the use of Foo Time. Foo Time is time for Hipmunks to spend however they want, Hipmunk related or not. They ...

Hipmunk has been a startup for six years. In that time, we have developed an iOS app that not only searches flights and hotels, but can also be used to discover new destinations. The app has been written by a rotating cast of about 8 developers over 5 years, no ...