Fire side chat with Mike Curtis

[2016-05-26 Thu 19:00] speaker: Mike Curtis, VP Engineering at AirBnB ** people you may know on FB used to show higher mutual friends first then priortize those that need the friend request to stay engaged ** why do people use AirBnB? people want a more authentic travel experience the offline experience drive traffic to AirBnB first time users come via word of mouth ** increasing conversion rate correct pricing increasing the number of listings that are instant bookable show information to promote a sense of urgency ** drive visitors to the site on-boarding new users brand marketing engagement emails ** retention naturally high ** crawling altavista wrote a crawler in perl that took down the site denial-of-service did not catch it as the requests were coming from an internal IP ** make sure what you are working on is working for you doing well at Yahoo, but Yahoo itself was on the downward spiral from director of engineering to engineering manager at facebook ** engineering culture agency, having a say on the right solution to a given problem involved right from the start, during the ideation phase ** bringing up a marketplace building a sense of trust, review and reputation system managing the community low friction, especially for payment ** increasing the review rate AirBnB have very high review rate, around 80% users are worried that reviews will offend and affect the home owner’s review introduce a simultaneous release of review from user and home owner ** technology adoption RoR is sufficient for the frontend, though it is not the most performant standardize on JVM languages for services, Java and Scala, for ease of operations ** hiring lucky to have a ready stream of candidates creating a highly diverse team is the challenge ** integrating design leadership team on a project includes product manager, enginering, designer, data scientist