CarGurus has joined the OpenJS Foundation! Founded in 2006, CarGurus (Nasdaq: CARG) is a multinational online automotive platform for shopping, buying, and selling new and used vehicles, recognized as the most visited automotive shopping site in the U.S.* CarGurus’ engineering departments are dependent on the open web to provide value to its dealer and consumer customers. 

“We are excited to welcome CarGurus as an OpenJS Foundation member. CarGurus is a heavy user of open source that benefits their customers in many important ways. At the same time, their engineering commitment to contributing back is well-known. They are a welcome addition to the OpenJS Foundation,” said Robin Ginn, executive director, OpenJS Foundation. “We look forward to CarGurus’ enthusiasm, leadership and technical expertise in helping to contribute to JavaScript development moving forward.”

“Open source is very important to how CarGurus builds its systems and products, and we benefit from the open source community. We see joining the OpenJS Foundation as an important step forward in being even more closely connected to the open source tools that help us better serve our customers,” said Matt Quinn, CTO at CarGurus. “Joining is another way to give back to the open source projects that give our team the technical tools to do our jobs with efficiency and quality, which is important for us to retain our competitive edge.”

CarGurus has used multiple OpenJS Foundation projects including:

• ESLint
• Express.js
• Lodash
• Moment.js
• Node.js
• nvm
• webpack
• Electron

Why use OpenJS Foundation projects? OpenJS and its supporting community build powerful tools that help CarGurus deliver better experiences to its customers while enabling engineers to move faster with greater confidence. CarGurus leverages tools like ESLint, webpack, nvm, and Node.js to help deliver code that is higher quality, faster to develop, served more efficiently, and is more performant for customers. 

With a cutting-edge stack built on many of these tools and capabilities, CarGurus has made strides in delivering an improved customer experience, including fluid performance demonstrated by reduced Core Web Vitals scores. Having seen the positive impact, OpenJS projects continue to play an important role in CarGurus’ mission to improve its customer and employee experience.

“JavaScript is growing and innovating because of real world needs from customers and end users. The importance of reaching customers with higher performance and more intuitive and simpler interfaces is helping JavaScript innovate and grow,” said Michael "Dr. Max" Maximilien, OpenJS Foundation Board Chair and Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research. “We welcome CarGurus' continued contributions, and while they are just joining the OpenJS Foundation officially they have used and contributed back to a long list of OpenJS Foundation projects for years now.”

Strong Commitment to Open Source at CarGurus

Open source engineers are often volunteers who work on their passion project after hours and on weekends, even if their main employment uses the software. At CarGurus, there is an explicit commitment to work with outside software and to give back. 

Part of the philosophy of the engineering group is to not only focus on features and  infrastructure, but to give back control to engineers by allowing “Pit Stop Days” and “Guilds”  (internal meetups) to discuss topics, share knowledge, and to find software projects to work and collaborate on. 

The idea is that engineers themselves should decide where to dive into something that can enhance CarGurus workflow development, performance, or other areas of work. The thinking is bottom-up. And there is a focus on identifying when something could be open sourced or contributed back to an open source project.

Internally Developed Open Source

CarGurus is also building a culture around the community internally. From there, the idea is to push that out externally to partners, not only to learn but to contribute back. 

CarGurus has projects that have been developed internally and have been released as open source:

• Transmish is a React utility library. It is a collection of components, hooks, and functions for supporting front-end development in React. These are meant to be simple and reusable abstractions over tasks that React developers do on a regular basis. 
• HashCachePlugin is an experimental incremental build plugin for Webpack. Incremental builds increase the speed of the development workflow by avoiding rebuilding unchanged entries. However, in large projects, the caching process can be expensive. HashCachePlugin uses Rust for resource-intensive caching, which accelerates the caching process. Built with napi-rs!

The CarGurus Open Source Fund

Started in 2019 and completely engineering-driven, this employee-led charitable initiative gives back to open source projects that help underpin the company’s technology. It was a grassroots initiative, initially starting as discussions in Slack about open source projects that were worth looking into and those that may have maintainers who are burnt out and need funding. 

The budget for the Open Source Fund is not doled out equally. There are internal discussions about what open source projects are relevant to CarGurus and a voting process to determine which projects to support. This empowers engineers to choose open source projects for which they have a passion and believe are deserving of financial support. 

CarGurus has provided both one-time contributions and has become a member of projects where the company contributes annually. For example, they have recently engaged in different forms of collaboration with open source projects like WebPack, Babel, and Rust.

Want to become a Member of the OpenJS Foundation?

If you are interested in learning more about corporate membership, please contact us or fill out a membership application! Join now!

*SimilarWeb, Traffic Report (Cars.com, Autotrader, Truecar), Q3 2023, USA