Earlier this month, the Pricing Algorithms team had a Community Service Hack Day here at our office, dedicating an afternoon to work on simple tools that could be used as part of any project. The day was an opportunity to fill any knowledge gaps in how our team overcomes common……
As an engineering leader, it can sometimes be a real struggle to make the work of your teams visible, especially in a problem space that doesn’t reside in traditional customer-facing areas. Without that visibility, it can be hard for team members to feel really great about what they’ve accomplished. To…
Since I began my tenure at Wayfair as a data scientist, many PhD students and postdocs have reached out to ask for advice about the transition to data science in industry. After a fruitful collection of conversations, I’ve realized that there are popular misconceptions about what it means to be……
Something we often emphasize on our teams here at Wayfair is that ideas could and should come from everywhere. It is important that every individual, not just our business owners, product managers, and designers, are thinking about our work in the context of the overall the customer experience. When it…
The Supply Chain Engineering organization at Wayfair helps power, connect, and optimize differentiated shipping and delivery programs, consistently executes against customer promises, and maintains effective stewardship of the bottom line. We are responsible for every step in the supply chain from the moment you order a couch on our website,…
As Data Science has become increasingly important to Wayfair’s success, so has the quest to find great people to join our team – individuals who are intelligently connected to their work and constantly learn, study, experiment, and create. Hiring for and branding our data science initiatives is merely one element……
In the Wayfair Network Operations Center (NOC) we wear a lot of hats: Code Deployers, Debuggers, Production Triage, and Incident Coordination, to name a few. Just this month we’ve responded to an average of 256 alerts a day and are staffed 24×7 with a team spanning two continents, servicing several…
Exaptation is an evolutionary term, where a trait that is evolved to serve one function subsequently serves another. To quote Dave Snowden, “Dinosaurs did not throw themselves out of trees and hope to eventually evolve wings.” Feathers were part of warmth, and maybe mating, but eventually this novel idea of…
A few years ago, after reading this blog post by Jeff Atwood, we started handing out rubber ducks to new hires in Wayfair Engineering, to encourage self-reliance and good questions in mentoring situations. We have accumulated a lot of ducks over the years throughout the department, but our Search Technologies…
Q1: What’s the tech stack in a nutshell? A: PHP on Linux, and a few data backends, with continuous deployment at the pace of ~250 zero-downtime code pushes a day. Q2: Whoah, that’s a lot of code pushes! Break that down for me. A: What I’m actually counting there is…
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,…
