How Airbnb is Boosting Data Literacy With ‘Data U Intensive’ Training

Since we introduced Airbnb’s Data University, the program has continued to thrive and evolve. One improvement has been the addition of team-specific trainings with content tailored to the work of that team. In this post, we describe the impact of this addition and the lessons learned in its implementation. What is Data University? …

On Spark, Hive, and Small Files: An In-Depth Look at Spark Partitioning Strategies

Author: Zachary Ennenga Airbnb’s new office building, 650 Townsend Background At Airbnb, our offline data processing ecosystem contains many mission-critical, time-sensitive jobs — it is essential for us to maximize the stability and efficiency of our data pipeline infrastructure. So, when a few months back, we encountered a recurring issue that caused significant outages of our data…

Contextualizing Airbnb by Building Knowledge Graph

By Xiaoya Wei and Yizheng Liao A riverfront, all-bamboo house on Airbnb in Bali. Imagine you are planning a trip to Los Angeles. The first step is to visit Airbnb.com and search for “Los Angeles.” On the backend, the query “Los Angeles” is translated into a block on the map; available Homes within this block are returned in…

Inside Connect: Supporting Apprentices as an Engineering Leader

As an engineering leader with 15+ years of industry experience, I am currently head of engineering for the Marketing Technology Platform at Airbnb. Our goal is to build world-class technology systems and tools that power the unique blend of performance and brand marketing strategies at Airbnb. In this post, I’d…

Moving Lottie Swiftly into the Future

Come and join us in working on Swift development in our gorgeous office! Lottie is a library for Android, iOS, Web, and Windows that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as JSON with Bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile and on the web. If you haven’t already read Brandon’s post about the Swift rewrite of Lottie on iOS, check it out! We’d…

Introducing Deploy Pipelines to Airbnb

The deployment pipeline is used for services that power these unique Experiences on Airbnb.com. At Airbnb, downtime is not just an inconvenience — there is often substantial real-world impact on our users. As a constant reminder of this incredibly important fact, we created a prominently placed poster of a single tweet from many moons ago. Roughly paraphrased, it reads: @AirbnbHelp Help! I’m locked outside…

Zooming Towards Human Connection

By: Fatemeh Alavizadeh, Mojtaba Mehrara Meet the dogs of Chernobyl on this Online Experience hosted by Lucas Introduction Creating human connection is the core of Airbnb’s mission. We launched Airbnb Experiences to encourage travelers to connect with locals and with each other through one-of-a-kind experiences that highlight the uniqueness of their destinations. We’ve since grown it to a community of hosts leading more…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

Visualizing Data Timeliness at Airbnb

Imagine you are a business leader ready to start your day, but you wake up to find that your daily business report is empty — the data is late, so now you are blind. Over the last year, multiple teams…

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

by Hao Wang and Liyin Tang Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking… Logging Event Ingestion at Airbnb Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations. Each event carries a specific piece of information. For example, when a guest searches for a beach house…

Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb

Authors: Shijing Yao, Qiang Zhu, Phillippe Siclait Walking into our new office in San Francisco, meeting rooms evoke the variety of our… Airbnb is a marketplace featuring millions of homes. Travelers around the world search on the platform and discover the best homes for their trips. Aside from location and price, listing photos are one of the most critical factors for decision-making during a guest’s…

Introducing Showkase: A Library to Organize, Discover, and Visualize Your Jetpack Compose Elements

Over the last few years, Android™ development has gone through significant changes in how apps are structured, the language used for development, the tooling & libraries that speed up our development, and the improvements in testing apps. What didn’t change in all these years is the Android UI toolkit. This…

What’s Next for Mobile at Airbnb

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. Exciting Times Ahead Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting…

Discovering and Classifying In-app Message Intent at Airbnb

Authors: Michelle Du, Shijing Yao Get embraced by plenty of natural light, brick, and plant in our new office in… Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where everyone can belong anywhere. Ensuring good communication between guests and hosts is one of the keys to developing a sense of belonging as well as a smooth and worry-free trip experience for guests. Millions of guests and…

How does Airbnb track and measure growth marketing?

Introduction Airbnb’s mission is to “Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” This message is delivered to people all around the world through marketing, e.g., See What’s Possible When It’s Made Possible by Hosts. It helps Airbnb connect guests and hosts…

Listing Embeddings in Search Ranking

By Mihajlo Grbovic, Haibin Cheng, Qing Zhang, Lynn Yang, Phillippe Siclait and Matt Jones Airbnb’s marketplace contains millions of diverse listings which potential guests explore through search results generated from a sophisticated Machine Learning model that uses more than hundred signals to decide how to rank a particular listing…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Jonathan Parks, Vaughn Quoss, Paul Ellwood Introduction At Airbnb, we’ve always had a data-driven culture. We’ve assembled top-notch data science and engineering teams, built industry-leading data infrastructure, and launched numerous successful open source projects, including Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. Meanwhile, Airbnb has transitioned from a startup moving at light…

Supporting Dynamic Type at Airbnb

By Noah Martin & Hugo Ahlberg Background Since iOS 7, Dynamic Type has allowed users to choose a prefered font size for their phone. At Airbnb, we try to build an app that our entire community can use — since Dynamic Type is a critical accessibility feature, we knew supporting it…

Airbnb Engineering in Seattle

Want to know what it’s like to work in Airbnb’s new office? Ari Steinberg, Director of Engineering and Head of the Airbnb Seattle office, shares more on Airbnb’s Seattle presence. Why is Airbnb in Seattle? We wanted to expand our footprint outside of San Francisco to attract some of the…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In part three of this series we saw how automated interaction testing can cover some of the code paths in our ViewModels by recording state changes. However…

Building a faster web experience with the postTask scheduler

When was the last time you opened a page on a website and tried to click on something multiple times for it to work? Or the last time you swiped on an image in a carousel and it stuttered and shifted around unnaturally? While this type of experience happens far…

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Part-I: Introducing Minerva — Airbnb’s Metric Platform By: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Maggie Zhu, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Xiaohui Sun Introduction At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance…

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

I had the opportunity to kick off GraphQL Summit last month with a talk that involved quite a bit of live coding (the Keynote intro ends at minute 6:00 if you’re in a hurry!). Check it out: From the feedback I gathered over the following days of the conference…

Introducing Epoxy for iOS

Epoxy’s story on iOS began in 2016. Swift was still a very new language, and we had recently started to broadly adopt it across our codebase. With the new language, we were still experimenting with how to best build UI. …

Contextual Calendar Reminders

By Tao Cui and Yuting Gu Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. So when hosts forget to update their calendars and are booked by guests on dates that don’t work, the host has to cancel the reservation. This definitely does not make the guests…