As we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and retail’s peak season for 2018, I wanted to reflect back on some excitement we had earlier in the year at Wayfair; specifically how we reacted and built, as a tech team, toward challenges we hadn’t seen before. I hope other e-commerce…
When people think of Wayfair, they often think of the slick website, catchy TV ads, and personable customer service. They also obviously think of furniture. What they don’t think about, however, is how that furniture gets to the customer. Many people don’t realize that UPS and FedEx won’t bring a…
So, you graduated college, spent half a decade in a quantitative PhD program, maybe took a postdoctoral fellowship….and now what? You may want to stay the course and pursue a tenure track faculty position at a university–or, you may not. While the pressure to remain within the academy post PhD…
Being a long distance runner has taught me a lot about being an engineering leader. I’ve spent the last 15 years running races of all distances, some of which were great, and others that we’ll just call “learning opportunities”. I’ve also spent those same 15 years honing my skills as…
Here at Wayfair, we are faced with challenges that the average iOS developer likely never has to come across. In the last eight months, we’ve had 47 different developers make 2,000 commits into our repository. Over the past six years, this monumental amount of changes has led to a codebase…
Uplift models seek to predict the incremental value attained in response to a treatment. For example, if we want to know the value of showing an advertisement to someone, typical response models will only tell us that a person is likely to purchase after being given an advertisement, though…
Search is critical to the customer experience at Wayfair. What we show on the first page of results is incredibly important for users. The graph below shows what many people might already know when it comes to browsing and search habits: The majority of customers rarely look beyond the products…
The world of owning home furnishings is similar to owning clothes: Nobody wants to see someone else wearing the same dress. Wayfair has a zillion couches in many different colors, designs, and styles to choose from, and we expanded that reach even further when we created our Custom Upholstery Experience….
Moving a couch across multiple countries to land in your living room, a couple of days after placing an order, is a challenging business. The Transportation Engineering team at Wayfair, who look after the transportation portion of our logistics, knows this all too well. This capability has given us a…
It’s been seven months since Dan Uhl reflected on our conversion to React and Redux at Wayfair. The article was written right after the Product Detail Page (or PDP – you might know it as the page you see when you’re ready to purchase a product here at Wayfair) was…
I have just hit the “publish” button on Wayfair’s Tech Radar. This is a manifestation of our commitment to transparently share how we think about the technologies we use to build our systems and applications. We are publicly sharing the exact same version externally that we use to guide internal…
