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…

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 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…

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…

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.

Fighting Financial Fraud with Targeted Friction

The piano in our “Vienna” meeting room in San Francisco has an easter egg. Move… On any given night, nearly two million people are staying in Airbnb listings in 191 countries around the world. The rapid growth of our global community is predicated on one thing: trust. We take a comprehensive approach to trust, which consists of both robust proactive measures and reactive support, but…

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. …

Improving Deep Learning for Ranking Stays at Airbnb

Search ranking is at the heart of Airbnb. Data from search logs* indicate it is a feature used by more than 90% of guests to book a place to stay. In ranking, we want the search results (referred to as listings) to be sorted…

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…

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…

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…

Scaling a Mature Data Pipeline — Managing Overhead

Author: Zachary Ennenga The view from the third floor at Airbnb HQ! Background There is often a natural evolution in the tooling, organization, and technical underpinning of data pipelines. Most data teams and data pipelines are born from a monolithic collection of queries. As the pipeline grows in its complexity, it becomes sensible to leverage the Java or Python Spark…

Introducing Epoxy for iOS

Epoxy’s story on iOS began in 2016. Swift was still a very new language, and we had recently started to broadly adopt it across our codebase. With the new language, we were still experimenting with how to best build UI. …

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…

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…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

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…

Project Lighthouse — Part 2: Measurement with anonymized data

Introduction In June, the Airbnb…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…