Over this past summer, Wayfair upgraded from Exchange 2007 to a new, highly available, Exchange 2010 email environment. With it brought many improvements, but with these enhancements came new methods for performing common tasks. One operation affected by the upgrade was the mailbox export process. To export a mailbox in…
A group of engineers from Wayfair will pause trying to make Halloween pictures in Graphite and stop looking for a ghost in the machine with Skyline this weekend to head over to the 8th reincarnation of BarCampBoston. BarCampBoston is a great example of an unconference. These conferences are filled with…
Overview There’s storm in Wayfair! And yes, the “a” article before the word “storm” is purposely not there. When referring to “storm” at Wayfair, we do not mean a conglomerate of barometric circumstances that lead to downpours from the skies and other natural phenomena (a storm); we mean real-time computation,…
When our company’s co-founder encouraged all of our Engineering department to participate in the Google Glass Explorer contest, I thought about project ideas that could help people by using the unique features of this new augmented-reality technology. I remembered a project that some fellow students did during a robotics class…
Wayfair was invited to be a sponsor at this year’s Beanpot Hackathon (link: http://www.hackbeanpot.com/), held last week at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge. The concept of a hackathon is so closely related to our core values, that we jumped at the opportunity to participate. Wylie Conlon, along with others…
At Wayfair Engineering, we’re not just proud of the elegant technical solutions we implement, but we’re also proud of our team. As part of our team bonding, we have frequent “Pod Outings,” activities that can be organized by any member of the Engineering team. Some recent Pod Outings have included…
It started as a proof of concept prototype in the fall of 2010. The idea came from a meeting where we were discussing the porting of our storefront codebase from classic ASP to PHP. One of the discussion points was how to avoid simply porting the same logic from one…
At Wayfair, we are big fans of Dell’s server platform, so naturally we were excited when their 12G line of servers started shipping. We are also very big fans of FreeBSD. Ahead of our first order for a new Dell PowerEdge r720, we did some research and found that the…
You would think data replication is a piece of cake these days given all the advances in database technology, and that’s true for the most part when you’re dealing with databases of the same type, but when you have to replicate parts of your product catalog with other companies, things…
Here at Wayfair, we have thousands of suppliers we work with in order to provide our products to our customers. To automate the bulk of these interactions, we use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), so that we can trade documents back and forth. FTP is still one of the predominant methods…
FreeBSD has spent the last few years implementing awesome Solaris-based features such as DTrace and ZFS. Here at Wayfair, we use FreeBSD on our servers and our development environments. As a security engineer for Wayfair, I’m tasked with many fun projects. I get to test out different configurations and applications…
