A feature platform that offers observability and management tools, allows ML practitioners to use a variety of data sources, while handling the complexity of data engineering, and provides low latency streaming. By: Varant Zanoyan, Nikhil Simha Raprol Chronon allows ML practitioners to use a variety of data sources as inputs to feature transformations. It handles the complexity of data plumbing, such as batch and streaming compute, provides low latency serving, and offers a host of observability and management tools. Airbnb is happy to announce that Chronon, our ML Feature Platform, is n ..read more

Part two on how we built a Compose based architecture with Mavericks in the Airbnb Android app By: Eli Hart, Ben Schwab, and Yvonne Wong In the previous post in this series, we introduced you to Trio, Airbnb’s framework for Jetpack Compose screen architecture in Android. Some of the advantages of Trio include: Guarantees type safety when communicating across module boundaries in complex apps Codifies expectations about how ViewModels are used and shared, and what interfaces look like between screens Allows for stable screenshot and UI tests and simple navigation test ..read more

A three part series on how we built a Compose based architecture with Mavericks in the Airbnb Android app By: Eli Hart, Ben Schwab, Yvonne Wong At Airbnb, we have developed an Android framework for Jetpack Compose screen architecture, which we call Trio. Trio is built on our open-source library Mavericks, which it leverages to maintain both navigation and application state within the ViewModel. Airbnb began development of Trio more than two years ago, and has been using it in production for over a year and a half. It is powering a significant portion of our production screens in Air ..read more

How Airbnb achieved a smooth and transparent migration from Buck to Bazel on iOS, with minimal interference to developer workflows By: Qing Yang, Andy Bartholomew At Airbnb, we are committed to providing the best experience for our engineers. To offer a cohesive and efficient build experience across all platforms, we’ve decided to adopt Bazel as our build system. Bazel is a robust build system widely utilized in the industry. In alignment with Airbnb’s tech initiatives, both our backend and frontend teams initiated the migration process to Bazel. In the first Bazel post, we start with our iOS ..read more

KDD (Knowledge and Data Mining) is a flagship conference in data science research. Hosted annually by a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), it’s where you’ll learn about some of the most ground-breaking developments in data mining, knowledge discovery, and large-scale data analytics. Airbnb had a significant presence at KDD 2023 with two papers accepted into the main conference proceedings and 11 talks and presentations. In this blog post, we’ll summarize our team’s contributions and share highlights from an exciting week of workshops, panel discussions, a ..read more

How we championed the CRM CI/CD framework integrating Salesforce DX, GIT, BUILDKITE and Vlocity for an enhanced, efficient and continuous delivery with high software quality. By: Sharda Kumari Pramod Gavade Introduction The CRM platform offers a robust suite of functionalities for building scalable applications with minimal reliance on complex coding. However, managing and deploying code and configurations within this ecosystem can be challenging, and the constantly evolving nature of the platform presents an extra layer of complexity. This can lead to slow deployment times, difficu ..read more

By: Clark Wright Introduction These days, as the volume of data collected by companies grows exponentially, we’re all realizing that more data is not always better. In fact, more data, especially if you can’t rely on its quality, can hinder a company by slowing down decision-making or causing poor decisions. With 1.4 billion cumulative guest arrivals as of year-end 2022, Airbnb’s growth pushed us to an inflection point where diminishing data quality began to hinder our data practitioners. Weekly metric reports were difficult to land on time. Seemingly basic metrics like “Active Listings ..read more

How Airbnb leverages ML/NLP to extract useful information about listings from unstructured text data to power personalized experiences for guests. By: Hongwei Li and Peng Wang Introduction At Airbnb, it’s important for us to gather structured data about listings and better understand the data, so we can help Hosts provide great experiences for guests. For example, guests who work remotely need to know if a listing has a suitable workspace and reliable internet, while guests with children might need items like highchairs and cribs. However, not all listings clearly display these attr ..read more

My Journey to Airbnb — Helena Zarazua Growing from engineering apprentice to seasoned iOS developer Languages have always come naturally to Helena Zarazua, who has used this skill to bring people together, whether by teaching English to Chinese businesspeople or by immersing American preschoolers in Spanish. Since then, Helena joined Airbnb through the Connect engineering apprenticeship program and has stayed on as a full-time engineer. She’s picked up new (programming) languages like Swift to specialize in iOS development, and works on features to create a world where anyone can belong ..read more

How Airbnb adopted SwiftUI in our iOS app Bryn Bodayle When constructing an app’s user interface (UI), the choice of framework is incredibly important. The right UI framework can make an app feel smooth, responsive, even delightful, while a UI framework that doesn’t match an app’s needs can make it feel sluggish and broken. This principle extends to developer experience as well; a UI framework with well-designed APIs can enable engineers to express themselves fluently, efficiently, and correctly, while one with the wrong abstractions or inconsistent APIs can make engineers’ jobs more dif ..read more