Capturing Data Evolution in a Service-Oriented Architecture

The dining hall in the San Francisco Office is always gleaming with natural sunlight! Labor day weekend is just around the corner! Karim is amped for a well deserved vacation. He logs in to Airbnb to start planning a trip to San Francisco, and stumbles upon a great listing hosted by Dany. He books it. A moment later, Dany receives a notification that his…

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…

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…

Introducing MvRx: Android on Autopilot

Havana Vieja, a great place to hang out at Airbnb HQ when you want to… At Airbnb, we are moving at a faster pace than ever. Each year, more and more people are using Airbnb to travel. This year alone, we have already launched Airbnb Plus and we have countless other projects underway that we can’t wait to share. On the Android side of things…

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…

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…

A “Krispr” Approach to Kubernetes Infrastructure

Introduction Airbnb is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In our production infrastructure, we run hundreds of services that do everything from calculating pricing to returning search results to sending messages to users. To unify and scale our infrastructure, we use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration engine, to define and…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In our first article we looked at the MvRx mocking system, and the Launcher that opens any screen or mock in the app. While…

React Native at Airbnb: The Technology

This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. React Native itself is a relatively new and fast-moving platform in the cross-section of Android, iOS, web, and cross-platform frameworks. After two years…

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…

Dynein: Building a Distributed Delayed Job Queueing System

An Airbnb Plus listing in Argyll, Scotland Introduction Asynchronous background jobs can often dramatically improve the scalability of web applications by moving time-consuming, resource-intensive tasks to the background. These tasks are often prone to failures, and retrying mechanisms often make it even more expensive…

ts-migrate: A Tool for Migrating to TypeScript at Scale

TypeScript is the official language of frontend web development at Airbnb. Yet, the process of adopting TypeScript and migrating a mature codebase containing thousands of JavaScript files didn’t happen in one day. TypeScript adoption went through the process of an initial proposal, adoption by multiple teams, a beta phase and…

The Smart Instant Book Filter

By Yi Hou, Li Fan & Tao Cui People like it when things are fast. We want our deliveries within an hour, our downloads within a minute, and our news in an instant. That is why we need to help our Airbnb community to book listings they want instantly. Instant…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

A seven part series on Android Test Frameworks we’ve built at Airbnb — this first part looks at our philosophy on testing, and the mocking system that lays the foundation for all our tests. Automated testing for Android development has historically been challenging at Airbnb, due to both technical and…

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System

Authors: Jon Chew and Ninad Khisti One of the conference rooms in our San Francisco office Background Airbnb has been migrating its infrastructure to a Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”). SOA offers many upsides, such as enabling developer specialization and the ability to iterate faster. However, it also poses challenges for billing and payments applications because it makes it more difficult to…

Our Swift Style Guide Is Now Open Source

Some of Airbnb’s native engineers talking in our Native Product Development tech talk last August A brief history of Swift at Airbnb At WWDC 2014, Apple surprised us with a new language: Swift. At Airbnb, we quickly jumped in head first and wrote our first line of…

Operationalizing Node.js for Server Side Rendering

At Airbnb, we have spent years steadily migrating all Frontend code to a consistent architecture where entire web pages are written as a hierarchy of React components hydrated with data from our API. The role Ruby on Rails plays in getting the web to the browser is reduced every day…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In previous articles we’ve looked at Airbnb’s product architecture, the mocking system we built for it, and how this ecosystem…

Adding support for Arabic and Hebrew languages on Airbnb

Authors: Yaniv Zimet, Mati Bot What makes this noteworthy? Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, and with this release, we enable more than 300 million Arabic- and Hebrew-speakers globally to belong on Airbnb. Arabic and Hebrew are both languages that use a right-to-left (RTL) writing direction. The start…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 4

By Junjie Guan, Rui Dai and Xing An Intro In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our Building Services at Airbnb series, we shared how…

Taming Service-Oriented Architecture Using A Data-Oriented Service Mesh

By: Raymie Stata, Arun Vijayvergiya, Adam Miskiewicz At Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conf on October 22, we presented Viaduct, what we’re calling a data-oriented service mesh that we believe will bring a step function improvement in the modularity of our microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In…

Amenity Detection and Beyond — New Frontiers of Computer Vision at Airbnb

Authors: Shijing Yao, Dapeng Li, Shawn Chen What amenities are there in this image? Can an algorithm detect them all? How can we train the algorithm effectively? If you are interested in the answers, please read on! Introduction In 2018, we published a blog post titled Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb…

Production Secret Management at Airbnb

Keys are handed off during a check-in in Shanghai Airbnb is a global community built on trust. The Security team helps to build trust by maintaining security standards to store, manage and access sensitive information assets. These include secrets, such as API keys and database credentials. Applications use secrets to provide everyday site features, and those secrets used to…

Building an Inclusive Codebase

By: Michael Bachand, Amanda Vawter, Dan Federman, Jake Silver, Julia Wang, Mark Tai Code is our craft. At Airbnb, we view our code and product as a reflection of our values. Each developer imbues their work with a piece of themselves. We want…

How Druid enables analytics at Airbnb

By Pala Muthiah and Jinyang Li Wikipedia: A druid was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures… Airbnb serves millions of guests and hosts in our community. Every second, their activities on Airbnb.com, such as searching, booking, and messaging, generate a huge amount of data we anonymize and use to improve the community’s experience on our platform. The Data Platform Team…