airbnb gives a take home instead of whiteboard coding: got asked to build a simplified booking system API. 3 endpoints: search availability, create reservation, cancel reservation. handle double-booking prevention. had 48 hours. spent about 6 hours on it. wrote it in python with fastapi, sqlite for storage, and comprehensive tests. the onsite follow-up was a 45 min code review where they asked me to extend it with pricing tiers and discount logic live

Airbnb senior - take home project was actually good

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airbnb gives a take home instead of whiteboard coding: got asked to build a simplified booking system API.

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airbnb take homes are the gold standard. they test real engineering - API design, data modeling, edge case handling, testing discipline

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the double booking prevention is the key differentiator. if you used database-level locking or optimistic concurrency control thats what they want to see

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6 hours is reasonable. ive heard of people spending 20+ hours gold plating their submission. diminishing returns after about 8 hours