State machines – they’ve been around for a long time in computer science, but are perhaps forgotten in the last few decades, at least in mobile apps. My team at Wayfair chose to revisit state machines and give them a try in our production app. This is how we came…
When you walk into a company like Wayfair, it can feel overwhelming. There are more than 2,300 engineers across the organization. Every person you talk to seems smarter than the last. Staff engineers are responsible for famous open source libraries and massive technical achievements. It can definitely be a scary…
Domain-specific languages (DSLs) – are they worth the hype? In a recent investigation, our Berlin-based Android Team were looking to further optimize Wayfair’s Android app, and were looking around for options. With the inconvenience of creating a UI in XML, and the appeal of a language that focuses on a…
The App Platforms Team at Wayfair, empowering a team of more than 60 mobile developers with efficient tooling and processes, has been actively looking at the performance of it’s mobile offerings, turning this into more focused work in the past few months. We wanted to involve as many of the…
Wayfair’s software engineering history demonstrates a common theme throughout its time: It moves fast and is a core trait of our business. To create and support the right foundations, we need our infrastructure to move faster than our ideas, and this is especially true for our hybrid environment objectives in…
In September, Wayfair hosted React Boston 2018, two full days of augmented reality demos, beautiful and surprising web animations, DOM-related horror stories (with mostly happy endings), component kits, game shows, Forbidden Planet references, and more, all made possible by ReactJS. This year picked up on several of the themes introduced…
Uplift models seek to predict the incremental value attained in response to a treatment. For example, if we want to know the value of showing an advertisement to someone, typical response models will only tell us that a person is likely to purchase after being given an advertisement, though……
It’s been seven months since Dan Uhl reflected on our conversion to React and Redux at Wayfair. The article was written right after the Product Detail Page (or PDP – you might know it as the page you see when you’re ready to purchase a product here at Wayfair) was…
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…
Accurate performance monitoring is crucial for Wayfair’s Storefront Engineering team. Each day we deploy hundreds of code changes to the web application for our customer-facing websites, and each change has the potential to impact performance for better or worse. For this reason, we carefully monitor KPIs such as page load…
As part of the Python Platform Team here at Wayfair, I help support Wayfair’s 100+ Python engineers and data scientists. We’re the go-to team when it comes to better leveraging Python within the Wayfair Tech ecosystem. During some recent project work, we recently investigated a production issue with a Flask…
