Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Vaughn Quoss, Jonathan Parks, 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…

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…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 1

By Liang Guo, Frank Lin, and Junjie Guan Alexis, one of our hosts, shows some of her guests how to shuck oysters in… Airbnb is moving its infrastructure at an accelerated pace towards a SOA (service-oriented architecture), but moving from a monolithic Rails service towards a SOA while building out new products and features is not without its challenges. In this post, we share what…

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.

How Airbnb Standardized Metric Computation at Scale

Part II: The six design principles of Minerva compute infrastructure 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 As described in the first post of this series, Airbnb invested significantly in building Minerva, a single source of truth metric platform that standardizes the…

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…

WIDeText: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework

By Wayne Zhang, Mia Zhao, Yuanpei Cao Deep learning (DL) is helping us at Airbnb serve our stakeholders better…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

The.WAV hosting AFROHAUS Brunch in Los Angeles a few months ago Backend Engineer: Hmm. So you’re saying this “GraphQL” will allow any web or native engineer to arbitrarily query basically any field in any backend service, recursively, however they want, without any backend engineers involved? Frontend Engineer: Yeah, right? It’s amazing! […silence…] Backend Engineer: Guards, seize this person. For several years…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Building a Cross-Platform Mobile Team

This is the third in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. In addition to the countless technical pros and cons of React Native, we learned a ton about what React Native means for an…

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…

Interning at Airbnb with a disability

A picture of two people’s hands as one gives a key attached to a keychain… My name is Hilary Sun, and I’m a master’s student at Stanford University finishing my M.S in Computer Science. I worked as an engineering intern for the past twelve weeks on the Trust - Financial Fraud team, which keeps Airbnb’s business safe and secure by minimizing fraudulent financial losses while…