How Airbnb went from 60 minutes to 6 minutes build times.

Personally, I would like to call it the story of butterfly effect. You will figure out it why.

The moral of the story is start small and small tweaks can bring greater changes down the line.

Do you think from day one Airbnb started all the quality measures they have today or at least half of them?

Never, believe it or not they directly pushed commits to the master. Yikes, sounds old school?
Yet they today build their product within 6 minutes with the quality first approach they adopted over the time.

Let’s see what tweaks they did along the way. This is not covering everything but the points I felt would be ultra-important to get start if you have no clue.

Direct commits to the master branch

Direct commits to the master led bad code reaching the production servers impacting the up time and undoubtedly burning out the teams. With time the problem got worsen and the process became chaotic.

Every space, there are people who want to rectify problems and gladly Airbnb was gifted with such great personalities. They came up with the idea to submit pull requests rather than direct pushes to master. Eventually, without any mandatory policies everyone…