To celebrate Agoda’s 20th birthday, we brought together former and current leaders for a conversation reflecting on our unique culture and the evolution we’ve experienced over the years.
Here, Idan Zalzberg, our current Chief Technology Officer, speaks with Joost Doevelaar, our Founding CTO, who was in charge between 2005-2012. Read on to get a glimpse of our Tech team and culture.
What was the first major system you worked on at Agoda?
Joost: I joined Agoda in 2005, mainly to start developing and building the new generation of tools for Agoda. The first system I worked on was the EBE (Electronic Booking Engine). On my first workday, I started designing the data model and the whole interaction model. It was then built by a team of very capable engineers, like Meng and Niwat and their team. They maintained it until 2021 or 2022. I don’t know the exact date it was sunset, but I know it’s not in use anymore. That system survived the longest of all systems at Agoda—16 years is amazing!
How did you approach system architecture and scaling?
Joost: When I joined, the team was small and working on a three-tier technology. We thought differently and realized that delays in a middle tier would be too big, and databases couldn’t scale indefinitely. With Microsoft’s help, we designed a replication paradigm with many replicated databases, each serving only the content needed for the website. We connected the web server directly to the database. That architecture stood the test of time, certainly 10+ years. It was very successful and could scale by just increasing itself, which is what we wanted.
Can you share an example of scaling technology at Agoda?
Joost: Back in 2009, we started talking to Google and looking at their principles for uploading spreadsheets. We had about 35,000 keywords in Google, all managed by spreadsheets. We connected to their API, and sometimes Google had to tell us to back off because we were hitting their APIs too hard. We grew to hundreds of millions of keywords. The technology at Google wasn’t as advanced then, so we needed a lot of keywords. That effort tripled or quadrupled the company in one year. That’s really made a difference.
Any memorable hands-on moments from those early days?
Joost: There were multiple occasions when I was still very hands-on with a small team. I liked working with data, but sometimes things could get a little complicated. I have to go to my head of data to restore some data I accidentally deleted. Everyone laughed at me as the CTO who deleted data and had to ask the team to restore it.
What was your proudest moment as CTO?
Joost: In 2010, there were political problems in Bangkok, and our office was surrounded and partly destroyed by fire. We had to decide whether to let everyone work from home or still come to the office. In one weekend, we took everything we needed out of the building, ordered laptops, and set up hundreds of workspaces in a hotel. By Monday morning, people could start working. We set up a VPN to our data centers. That was a real accomplishment with a small team: the infrastructure team, me, and the content team. I’m very proud of what we did for the business.
What do you think was key to Agoda’s success during your time?
Joost: The team. As an executive team, we had a great group when we started, but also within IT, we had really great teams: a good data team, QA team, infrastructure team, and finance. We all worked hard and trusted each other. My IT team didn’t come early to the office, which sometimes frustrated me, but they always stayed late and went out to eat together.
Even now, 13 years after I left, I still keep in touch with them. I follow Agoda on LinkedIn and see how much the team has grown. Many of the original team have moved on to great jobs after Agoda. Being part of this team increased their value in the market, and that makes sense to me.
Any final thoughts on Agoda’s culture and team spirit?
Joost: The culture that started then remains today; the team spirit is everything at Agoda. That’s what makes me excited to go to work every day. It’s the team, the team, the team. That’s really everything there is in Agoda.
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