Hi, welcome to our relaunched tech blog, it's been quite some time in the works! Our last post was in 2019 – and to be fair there have been some distractions since – but we're delighted to be back.
So what's new? Well for now there's a fresh lick of paint and a reorganising of the content, and behind the scenes some of the basics have been taken care of – a fixed SSL certificate, new hosting and easier deployment.
I also hope there is a new set of stories to be told and experiences to be shared. We've had 15 new engineers join the team since our last post, five product partners and two designers; look out for their experiences of life at OpenTable Tech in Europe.
Several of these new colleagues personally took responsibility to relaunch the blog and I want to thank among others Daniel Ireson, Jeanice Nguyen, Justas Beresnevičius, Savithri K and Jason Bird for their persistence, organisation, creative flair and hard work during Culture Time to get to this point.
Culture Time for us is two days at the end of every sprint where the developer chooses how to spend their time; exploring new technologies, prototyping new features or taking online course are some of the things our engineers spend this time doing – and now 🤞 writing blog posts too.
I hope you find some content in this blog that makes a difference to your day. OpenTable Tech Europe are currently four teams spread across England (London), Germany (Berlin) and Lithuania (Kaunas). We code in Javascript (Node/React) and C# (.Net Core) and serve millions of diners and restaurants every month. We may talk to you about our SEO innovation, how machine learning can improve hospitality or the challenges of collaboration in a global company.
Finally I want you to get a sense of the enjoyment we have as we build OpenTable, with great colleagues to learn from and flexibility to work from anywhere at any time.
I'm proud of the team we have in Europe, their appetite to create great things and their professional growth. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't point out the the blog now has links to our open roles and encourage you to follow us on @OpenTableTechUK if you want to hear more.
Thanks for reading.
John Catterfeld – Senior Director of Engineering