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…
Being a long distance runner has taught me a lot about being an engineering leader. I’ve spent the last 15 years running races of all distances, some of which were great, and others that we’ll just call “learning opportunities”. I’ve also spent those same 15 years honing my skills as…
The world of owning home furnishings is similar to owning clothes: Nobody wants to see someone else wearing the same dress. Wayfair has a zillion couches in many different colors, designs, and styles to choose from, and we expanded that reach even further when we created our Custom Upholstery Experience….
Moving a couch across multiple countries to land in your living room, a couple of days after placing an order, is a challenging business. The Transportation Engineering team at Wayfair, who look after the transportation portion of our logistics, knows this all too well. This capability has given us a…
I have just hit the “publish” button on Wayfair’s Tech Radar. This is a manifestation of our commitment to transparently share how we think about the technologies we use to build our systems and applications. We are publicly sharing the exact same version externally that we use to guide internal…
This past summer, Wayfair welcomed 47 software engineering interns to its Boston headquarters. Traveling from 27 different universities across the United States, these interns were immersed in a summer internship that would challenge them to be critical thinkers, innovators, and collaborative team members as they partnered up with engineering teams…
No two people’s paths to Wayfair are exactly the same. On our data science team alone we employ physicists, neuroscientists, biophysical chemists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and more! Our data scientists are united by a love of data and a knack for problem solving, but each person has a different story…
Last week, President Obama awarded his Presidential Medals of Freedom. There were some incredible people on the list of recipients, and we salute them all. Most notably for us he recognized two women, Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper, who blazed a path in software development with their incredible breakthroughs, led the pack for…
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,…
Here’s our Frontline team at work, in our spiffy network operations center: [caption id="attachment_2043" align="alignleft" width="584"] Wayfair network operations center[/caption] Selling home goods on the internet isn’t rocket science, but if you actually wanted to send a couch to the moon, you’d want to plan for and monitor…
