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…

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…

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…

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…

Learning Market Dynamics for Optimal Pricing

How do you think market dynamics influences this beautiful home in Cape Town? Market dynamics plays a key role in matching guests with hosts in two-sided marketplaces such as Airbnb. Supply and demand vary drastically across different locations, different check in dates and different lead times until check-in. It is important for us to understand and forecast these spatial and temporal trends in…

Inside Connect: Airbnb’s Engineering Apprenticeship Program

by Beti Gathegi & Jacqui Watts Hello! We’re excited that you’re here to learn more about the Connect program. Before we share details, though, we’d like to introduce ourselves. We’re Beti Gathegi and Jacqui Watts — a team of two whose purpose at Airbnb is to help bring this program…

How We Enable Airbnb Team Members to Code Like a Mobile Engineer

Intro As part of the TechEd team, our team’s goal is to enable our technical talent through continuous learning programs. One of the most common programs we work on is new employee onboarding for Engineering and Data Science teams. However…

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…

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…

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…

Our Journey Towards Cloud Efficiency

Introduction Airbnb was born in the cloud. In 2008, while many companies were operating data centers, a few clicks on the AWS console brought Airbnb to life. From our first Ruby on Rails app, to our more recent adoption of service-oriented architecture, the ability to…

The Airbnb Talent Directory

The past few months have been hard for all of us, but it has been inspiring to see everyone, especially the Airbnb community, support each other during an unprecedented time. Our CEO, Brian Chesky, recently announced the departure of nearly 1,900 employees. Among these employees are incredibly talented Engineers and Data Scientists who have contributed to Airbnb in uncountable ways. To support our teammates departing Airbnb, we launched the Alumni Talent Directory, an opt-in directory which lists valued employees and contingent workers who have recently departed Airbnb. If you’re currently hiring or looking for incredible talent, the Talent Directory is full of amazing Engineers and Data Scientists, among others. We hope we can connect these individuals with new opportunities. It’s been an honor to work with such a talented team committed to our mission of belonging, and we’re confident any company would be lucky to have them. We’d also like to thank the cross-functional team that created the site in an extremely short period of time. We are all grateful for their hard work: Chris Arrington, Gina Groom, Noor Malik, Derek Southard, Parag Hardas, Robin Foyle, Mike Fowler, Christian Williams, Megan Gebhart, Alex Cheng, Steve Rafferty, Sonia Yang, Andy Tran, Angela Wu, Linsey Jackson, James Deslonde, Kelly Coldwell, as well as Joe Gebbia for inspiring the idea. Airbnb Alumni Talent Directory

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…

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…

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…

Empowering Data Science with Engineering Education

Authors: Michelle Du, Yu Guo, Jeff Feng Our brand new kitchen on the 2nd floor of 888 Brannan St. Since launching Data University (Data U) at Airbnb two years ago, our data education program has made significant progress towards our overarching vision of empowering every employee to make data-informed decisions. To date, over 400 courses have been taught to thousands of course…

Server Rendering, Code Splitting, and Lazy Loading with React Router v4

Challenge accepted. Nicole, one of our hosts, taking some guests on a sunrise walk and picnic above… Some Background on Server Rendering at Airbnb Historically, Airbnb has been a Rails app. A few years back that started to change, we began using Rails simply as a data layer, and all render logic started migrating into JavaScript in…

Airbnb’s Promotions and Communications Platform

By Paritosh Aggarwal and Henry Wu Introduction Airbnb is a busy marketplace with millions of active users across the globe. Billions of messages…

Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search

Searching for homes is the primary mechanism guests use to find the place they want to book. As the core of how the Airbnb marketplace functions, the goal of search ranking is to find guests the best possible options while rewarding the most deserving hosts. Ranking at Airbnb is a…

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…

Continuing Our Support of Lottie Open Source Community

After years of working with open source contributors to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

Interaction Testing Part two of this series covered our screenshot testing approach. As our first integration tests, screenshots filled a gaping hole in our testing strategy and were immediately…

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…

Beyond “How May I Help you? “

By Xin (Cindy) Chen, Mengting Wan The Airbnb office in Dublin offers plenty of workspace beyond your desk. At Airbnb, we serve a global community of hosts and guests. An essential part of Airbnb’s business is to provide high quality customer service at scale. Live chat is one of our customer support channels, where customers can chat with our customer service agents…