At Wayfair, we pride ourselves on our speedy response times to issues during heavy web traffic to ensure a smooth customer experience. As we scale and continue adding products to our catalog, it is imperative that our backend infrastructure is able to handle increased traffic, especially during retail peaks and…
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…
As Wayfair’s business has scaled, so too has the size of our engineering teams – not to mention the complexity of the software features we’re building. At the same time, moving quickly in the global tech landscape has never mattered more. As a modern tech company, one simply cannot afford…
Jack Wood and I, CIO and Chief Architect of Wayfair, spoke at Stackdive, at Wayfair’s on April 23. Here’s the matching blog post we published on the Stackdive site, now crossposted here. Jack and I are both long-time software guys who now spend somewhat less of our time thinking about what to build,…
Wayfair Engineering places special emphasis on software testing as a means of maintaining stability in production. The DevTools team, which I am a member of, has built and integrated a number of tools into our development and deploy process in order to catch errors as early as possible, especially before…
We write a lot of PHP unit tests at Wayfair, and we want to be able to run them as fast as possible, which seems like a good use case for parallelization. Running tests in parallel is not built in to PHPUnit, but there are ways to do it. When…
We’ve received a few online, and in person questions like this, so i figured it was probably worth explaining in a little more detail. On the Deployment server, we have a variety of applications that we deploy. From Windows .Net Services, Python, Classic ASP, CSS/JS and PHP to name a few….
In part 1 of this 2-part series we used a comic strip to depict Python programmers and web operations folk working together to figure out how to deploy some scientific computing to an e-commerce site. Joking aside, let’s describe exactly what were were trying to accomplish, and how we did…
Python is my favorite computer language for data science, but it is a poorly standardized beast when it comes to packaging, deployment, web operations, etc. There are plenty of people who are deploying Python code to the web effectively, but especially in the data science area, there is no equivalent…
As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control….
Last January Eric Ries was kind enough to host a continuous deployment breakfast at Wayfair. It was a great discussion, and we were happy to learn that we have independently arrived at similar conclusions over the last 9 years, and built a system that aligns closely with some of the…
