Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are industry standard, best practices for web-scale software engineering. Wayfair has practiced CI for well over a decade, although the ways in which we have performed it have changed over time. I’m here to share with you the system we have built to coordinate…
Executive Summary Object detection is an important component of the computer vision workflow at Wayfair. The goal of object detection is to detect bounding boxes of the objects in an image along with the class information (Figure 1), which empowers many downstream applications. In this post, we will share a……
Domain-specific languages (DSLs) – are they worth the hype? In a recent investigation, our Berlin-based Android Team were looking to further optimize Wayfair’s Android app, and were looking around for options. With the inconvenience of creating a UI in XML, and the appeal of a language that focuses on a…
Serving effective personalized product recommendations is critical to providing a pleasant shopping experience for customers at Wayfair. To do this, the Wayfair Data Science team builds state of the art recommender systems that leverage the customer’s previous browsing history to surface products that match their interests. This week in Wayfair……
Most machine learning algorithms are designed to train on balanced datasets. Resultantly, when our data are highly imbalanced, a typical model will have atrocious recall. In this video, Wayfair Senior Data Scientist Trent Woodbury explains the three most common ways of handling this imbalanced data problem. Trent Woodbury……
Tech Together Boston (F.K.A. SheHacks Boston) is Boston’s largest all-female and non-binary hackathon. The event aims to bring together and empower femme and non-binary individuals interested in tech by providing a welcoming, collaborative environment where they can thrive and explore careers in software engineering, product development, and design. The event…
When it comes to mobile platforms, Wayfair has multiple end user focused apps across iOS and Android, with over 100 engineers working on them. As the recently appointed lead of the App Team here at Wayfair, I chose to ask fairly generic yet consistent questions upon my arrival to get…
How does a chemist with a postdoc in drug design end up working as a data scientist at an e-commerce home furnishings company? “Ha, so it’s a long story actually,” says Jen Wang, data science manager on the Marketing team at Wayfair. Jen always had an interest in healthcare, and……
John stands out in a room. With a flaming red beard and an arm of tattoos, he looks like he might be more at home in a Nordic tavern than an office. But once you notice his Captain Hammer t-shirt, the Gandalf action figure on his desk, and start talking……
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s Explainer Series, Data Science Tech Lead Peter B. Golbus discusses machine learning from a theoretical computer science perspective. In this video, we describe multiclass classification as an encoding task, i.e. a process for building compression schemes that convert large “files” (feature vectors) into small……
The App Platforms Team at Wayfair, empowering a team of more than 60 mobile developers with efficient tooling and processes, has been actively looking at the performance of it’s mobile offerings, turning this into more focused work in the past few months. We wanted to involve as many of the…
