by Tobi Knaup

At Airbnb, we build most of our user facing apps in Ruby on Rails, or more recently Node.js and our own Rendr framework.

We also have a number of internal services, and those are mainly written in Java for stability and performance.

Coming from a Ruby world, building anything in Java can feel pretty painful and boring. But thankfully there are modern Java libraries that make it easy and even fun. We build our Java services with Twitter Commons, a collection of libraries for building HTTP (and other) services. There isn't much documentation about how to get started with Twitter Commons, so we thought we'd post a little tutorial to help you get started.

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by Henry Cai

At Airbnb, we look into all possible ways to improve our product and user experience. Often times this involves lots of analytics behind the scene. Our data pipeline thus far has consisted of Hadoop, MySQL, R and Stata. We’ve used a wide variety of libraries for interfacing with our Hadoop cluster such as Hive, Pig, Cascading and Cascalog. However, we found that analysts aren’t as productive as they can be by using Hadoop, and standalone MySQL was no longer an option given the size of our dataset. We experimented with frameworks such as Spark but found them to be too immature for our use-case. So we turned our eye to Amazon Redshift earlier this year, and the results have been promising. We saw a 5x performance improvement over Hive.

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by Spike Brehm

Here at Airbnb, we've been looking curiously at Node.js for a long time now.  We've used it for odds and ends, such as the build process for some of our libraries, but we hadn't built anything production-scale.  Until now.

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by Christopher Lin

Ahh, the holidays — a time to enjoy the company of those closest to you and to reflect on the great experiences of the past year.  For users of Airbnb, those great experiences often include a trip where they got to see a new place through a local's eyes, or a chance to meet someone new by hosting.  That's why for every year since our inception in 2008, we've mailed holiday cards to our community, to thank them for making the Airbnb community great.

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by Jeff Yip

In a previous blog post, we discussed our path to upgrading to Rails 3.0 from Rails 2.3.  At the time, a number of comments asked about our upgrade path from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3.  We waited until the Rails 3.0 upgrade was complete and in production before beginning the Ruby upgrade.  It is probably a good thing, since upgrading our Ruby version required significantly more work than we had anticipated.

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by Harrison Shoff

A little while ago, Jonathan Cutrell opened an interesting issue about immediate-invoked function expressions (IIFEs) on our JavaScript style guide:

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