Expedia
For 10+ years I've been working on Expedia engineering working in multiple platforms from the web to native applications. Also backend services that power our experiences. I try to lead with the example and keep an open and honest conversation with my engineering team, product team and UX Designers.
The Challenge
Expedia is one of the biggest travel marketplace in the world, and as such the solutions required are hard. We have to build solutions cross-platform and cross-domains to allow us to be competitive in a fierce market. Expedia maintains web, ios and android applications, with an experience-layer and distributed domain services. So, stitching all together while being reliable, performant and easy to maintain ain't easy.
Platform Architecture
The platform required in such a big project like ours needs to allow us to work cross-platform. For that reason we have engineered an experience layer that communicates to our UI clients via GraphQL. We follow a SDUI paradigm where our graphql schema represents the UI that users will experience, this helps us to keep consistency across platforms, web, ios and android as all of them use the same graphql types to represent the UI elements.
Performance
We understand that performance is key to providing the best user experience, therefore it is very important that we work together between engineering, product and UX. If we all are aligned we can create solutions that cohesively work towards the same goal, provide the best experience to our users.
AI Integration
In recent years, LLMs and AI integrations have become more important to us. We are looking for ways to introduce AI to our daily work to be more efficient in the work we do and also to provide better and bigger features to our users.