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…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 2

By Liang Guo and Frank Lin Vittoria is treating his guests to a tour of the Limoncello factory, where family makes… Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards SOA. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly service platform is essential in an architectural evolution. In a previous post, we shared a bird’s-eye view of what we have designed and built to scale the development of services and gave…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 the previous article we detailed our test framework implementation. This was a high level look at the approach we take to running our tests…

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…

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…

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 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…

Project Lighthouse — Part 1: P-sensitive k-anonymity

Introduction In June, the Airbnb Anti-Discrimination product team announced Project Lighthouse, an initiative with the goal…

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

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…

Project Lighthouse — Part 2: Measurement with anonymized data

Introduction In June, the Airbnb…

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…

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…

React Native at Airbnb

Years later, it’s still possible to book a meeting in our Airstream This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. When Airbnb launched 10 years ago, smartphones were in their infancy. Since then, smartphones have become an essential tool to navigate our everyday…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …