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…
In April, I attended the Data Science Research Symposium at University of Massachusetts Amherst and gave a short talk highlighting Wayfair’s marketing data science projects. The full video and slides are below, but here’s an overview. Goals of marketing data science at Wayfair As the largest online retailer of furnishings…
Last month, the inaugural React Finland Conference was held on April 24–26 in Helsinki, Finland’s capital. It was the first ever React conference in Finland, and I was lucky enough to present a workshop there on component-driven development. Having React as a framework of choice at Wayfair, this was a…
As data scientists, we face a variety of problem types. One of our critical challenges is identifying the proper methodological approach to solve each problem. By doing this, we avoid force-fitting the wrong tool to solve a problem, and we avoid having to reformulate a question to fit a specific…
Here at Wayfair, we believe complexity theory to be valuable and quite helpful in terms of data center builds. In particular, there are certain ways we can use this theorem to prevent outages in the future. There will forever be unpredictable events – how do we assess their difficulty or…
This past weekend, Wayfair hosted the first-ever ReactJS conference on the East Coast. ReactBoston was a two-day whirlwind of talks on everything from the popular and pressing (React Fiber) to the unexpected and astounding (piloting drones with React; that sound you hear is the audience’s collective jaw hitting the floor)….
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…
Wayfair Engineering’s own Dan Milstein (@danmil) is giving an afternoon keynote tomorrow called “Reality is a Worthy Opponent” at MassTLC’s ReDev, which looks packed with great technical talks. It’s at MIT’s Samberg Conference Center in Cambridge, MA. If you’re in town, check it out! Registration (paid) here. [Ed: And the…
I’m super thrilled to announce that I’ll be representing Wayfair at 2 major conferences this year: CSS Dev Conference and the Strange Loop! My new talk “Light Speed Web with Progressive Web Apps” , which I present October 9 in New Orleans at @CSSDevConf, will cover the basics of PWA, the UX…
There are three events in Boston this week where Wayfair engineers will be speaking. On Monday, July 25th, I am on a panel called “What’s Hot in Tech: Providing Next Gen Experiences,” which is part of the MITX E-Commerce Summit 2016, being held all day, from 8:30 to 5, at…
