This essay earned the Clark Award in 2005 and originally appeared in the Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 2006. Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe states that, contrary to the advancement of technology and international communication, “we know very little about the inner meaning of spiritual and…

Writing prose can improve your programs and make you a more valuable asset. — Programming rests firmly on the foundation of math and logic. Writing is bound by an inconsistent and evolving set of rules. The electronic mind of the machine is coldly unforgiving when executing a buggy program, while essays riddled with problems are published constantly without any major issues. Superficially, these two…

Lottie is an open-sourced Android, iOS, Web, React Native, and Windows library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images. After years of working with open source contributors to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue…

Growing a successful open source project takes more than code — it takes a healthy community where contributors can engage in deep conversations with respect. A code of conduct is one important tool in helping a community uphold its own values. Belonging anywhere is at the core of Airbnb’s mission…

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…

There may be a lot of low-hanging fruit 🥝 affecting performance in areas you might not track very closely…but are still very important. — 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…

By Joe Lencioni It is fun to plant and harvest new crops in my garden, but I’ll eventually wake up to a mess if I don’t regularly weed. While each weed isn’t a problem by itself, they combine forces to choke the system. Working in a weed-free garden is a…

As I wrapped up my last couple of weeks at Brigade before joining Airbnb, I had a lot of good conversations with people asking for advice — and in my final commit message I wrote down some of it. …

Sometimes it’s the small things. At Brigade we use Jasmine along with the Jasmine gem to unit test our React.js application. This gem uses PhantomJS under the hood to run the specs in CI (in our case, Jenkins CI). We recently started using webpack’s css-loader (and cousins sass-loader and style-loader)…