Ever since Google pioneered the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we’ve seen product reliability, accountability, and assorted innovation in this space skyrocket in importance and scope. At Wayfair, we’ve been working hard to evangelize contemporary solutions to tricky scalability scenarios, investing thoughtfully in cloud enablement and containerization. With a…
Workplace diversity is not just an ethical issue. Teams that overcome diversity issues (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, experience) often achieve greater productivity than homogeneous teams. If you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you will be constantly challenged to reexamine facts, think deeper, and explain better. In this…
This summer, Wayfair hosted its first ever Community Coding Day. Through a partnership with three summer camp programs serving communities in the Greater Boston area, we welcomed 120 middle school students into our offices and led them through a day of engaging computer science activities. Our goal for the day…
Top left to right: Yumeng Ma (University of Michigan), Steven Yin (Columbia), Michael Spece, Carnegie Mellon University), Quinn Donahoe (University of Pittsburgh), Cristian Gavrus (UC Berkeley) Bottom left to right: Ai Xu (Harvard), Elyse Norton (NYU), Aybike Ulusan (Northeastern),Yuija Zhou (Boston University) It’s safe to say that Wayfair’s Data…
Come find us! Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be hitting the road. Data scientists and engineers from across our teams will be attending the SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Stockholm, Sweden. Here…
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…
