Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In previous installments of this series we laid out our state mocking system, and how we built UI integration testing on top of it. In…

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…

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…

Measuring Transactional Integrity in Airbnb’s Distributed Payment Ecosystem

By Ninad Khisti and William Betz In a distributed payment ecosystem, it is critical to accurately measure and track a transaction’s end to end state and contents to ensure consistency throughout the payment cycle. Without robust tracking, data leakage and errors can occur, resulting in either lost revenue or increased…

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…

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…

Designing Experimentation Guardrails

by Tatiana Xifara, Reid Andersen & Ali Rauh Each week, thousands of online experiments run concurrently on the Airbnb platform to measure the impact of potential product changes…

Introducing visx from Airbnb

by Chris Williams & Harrison Shoff After 3 years of development, 2.5 years of production use at Airbnb, and a rewrite in TypeScript we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of visx (formerly vx). You can find the project on GitHub and browse documentation and examples on airbnb.io. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Detecting Vulnerabilities With Vulnture

Introduction Securing assets and data is a challenging and important task, regardless of your industry or company size. On Airbnb’s InfoSec team, we are constantly thinking about how to quickly and effectively detect and remediate…

Machine Learning-Powered Search Ranking of Airbnb Experiences

By: Mihajlo Grbovic, Eric Wu, Pai Liu, Chun How Tan, Liang Wu, Bo Yu, Alex Tian Airbnb Experiences are handcrafted activities designed and led by expert hosts that offer a unique taste of local scene and culture. Each experience is vetted for quality by a team of editors before it…

Sunsetting React Native

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.Where are we today? Although many teams relied on React Native and had planned on using it for the foreseeable future, we were ultimately…

Building an Effective Test Pipeline in a Service Oriented World

This staircase connects several floors of our beautiful new San Francisco office, 650 Townsend. Context Over the past 2 years, Airbnb engineering has been working on a major initiative to migrate from a gigantic Rails Application to a decoupled service-oriented architecture, or SOA…

New Data Scientists: Tips for Success

You’re a new data scientist - congrats! If you are a junior data scientist in your first data role, you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I effectively execute?’ This…

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…

Achieving Insights and Savings with Cost Data

by Anna Matlin and Tamar Eterman Introduction Business profitability and sustainability are powerful reasons to invest in infrastructure efficiency, but it is easy to feel lost about how to actually reduce costs. A foundation of robust and actionable data is essential for a successful efficiency program. At Airbnb, building this foundation…

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…

Inside Connect: An Apprentice Perspective

Connect 2020 Apprentices at Airbnb HQ Hi, I’m Ale. I was a Connect 2020 Apprentice and I’m going to write a bit about my experience with the program, especially for those who are interested in applying. To learn more about the goals and structure of the Connect program, take a look at Part 1 of this…

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…

Enzyme’s Next Phase

In 2016, Airbnb released Enzyme, our React component testing library. In the following 4 years, the project has amassed more than 18,000 stars, and over 340 contributors. GitHub also tells us that Enzyme is used by over 230,000 repos and 24,000 packages, and npm reports that it is downloaded around 2 million times each week. The community’s response to this project has been astounding, to say the least. Much of Enzyme’s success is the result of the vibrant React community opening and commenting on actionable issues and submitting quality pull requests. All of your contributions have directly contributed to this project’s success—we could not have done this without you. This community is largely the reason why we are excited to announce that we will transfer ownership of Enzyme to the new enzymejs GitHub organization. We believe that this new home will help the project continue to support the community’s needs well into the future. The success here has moved beyond Airbnb as a single org and it’s time for our baby to be launched as a successful adult. Internally at Airbnb, Enzyme has been a catalyst for better frontend test coverage and is currently used in over 17,000 tests. While other options like React Testing Library have gained traction within Airbnb, we will still be using and contributing to Enzyme for the foreseeable future. If you want to help Enzyme grow, please check out the open issues and pull requests — the “help wanted” tag is a great starting point.

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…