How Bad Rails Conventions Got Me a Weekend Stay with the CEO of Airbnb
On November 16, 2022, Airbnb cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, shared that he's welcoming guests from anywhere to stay with him at his place in San Francisco:
It's wild (vulnerable, transparent, kind, generous, and humbling) for the CEO of a $60B company to welcome complete strangers into his home to host them – including cooking together and showing them the city – for a weekend. I left the January 2023 weekend with a renewed appreciation for how small the world is and fresh examples of a founder at work. This post serves to recount the experience, express appreciation, and log my observations as a source of future inspiration.
Brian anticipates hosting a number of strangers throughout the year. My significant other, Katie, and I were the first lucky guests that stayed with Brian.
I remembered Airbnb was founded in 2008 and one of the very first breakout startups to be built on Ruby on Rails. If you recall, Rails does not – by default – use random record IDs, including for things like user IDs, unless there's an explicit design choice to do so. For new record IDs created in the database, they're sequential (n+1) starting from 1.
