How Airbnb is Boosting Data Literacy With ‘Data U Intensive’ Training

Since we introduced Airbnb’s Data University, the program has continued to thrive and evolve. One improvement has been the addition of team-specific trainings with content tailored to the work of that team. In this post, we describe the impact of this addition and the lessons learned in its implementation. What is Data University? …

Introducing AloeStackView for iOS

Some of the ~200 screens in the Airbnb iOS app built using AloeStackView. At Airbnb, we’re always looking for ways to improve the efficiency of building products. Over the past few years, our mobile development efforts have increased at a dramatic rate. In the past year alone, we’ve added more than 260 screens to our iOS app. At the same time, more and…

React Performance Fixes on Airbnb Listing Pages

Airbnb has some incredible listings in Cuba…and also a corner of the office inspired by Habana Vieja We have been hard at work migrating the airbnb.com core booking flow into a single-page server-rendered app using React Router and Hypernova. At the beginning of the year, we rolled this out for…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

What’s Next for Mobile at Airbnb

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. Exciting Times Ahead Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting…

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…

Using Chatbots to Provide Faster COVID-19 Community Support

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…

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…

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…

Scaling Knowledge Access and Retrieval at Airbnb

Cherry blossoms in full bloom in Tokyo Imagine you’re finally getting to take that vacation you’ve dreamed of — three countries, seven cities, thousands of miles. It’s everything you could want and more, right? But where do you start? How do you know what to eat, where to visit, how to experience what makes your destination truly…

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…

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. …

Project Lighthouse — Part 2: Measurement with anonymized data

Introduction In June, the Airbnb…

Supercharging Apache Superset

By: Erik Ritter, Grace Guo, Jesse Yang, John Bodley, and Zuzana Vejrazkova Introduction At Airbnb, many employees rely on data every day to do their jobs. While several different tools are used for analysis, at the core of Airbnb’s self-serve business intelligence (BI) solution is Apache Superset™ (“Superset”). Superset is…

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…

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

by Hao Wang and Liyin Tang Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking… Logging Event Ingestion at Airbnb Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations. Each event carries a specific piece of information. For example, when a guest searches for a beach house…

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…