Early in 2017, in the course of deciding to convert to React as our frontend framework, we realized we needed to render our React components on the server. We adapted Airbnb’s open source Hypernova renderer for our purposes. In particular, we implemented custom module resolution and modified the Hypernova module…
Wayfair Engineering is excited to host and organize the first react.js conference in New England on September 23-24, 2017 here at our headquarters in Boston’s Back Bay. Over the last year we’ve partnered with ReactJS Boston, the local react user group, to sponsor and host react meetup events nearly every…
A few years ago, after reading this blog post by Jeff Atwood, we started handing out rubber ducks to new hires in Wayfair Engineering, to encourage self-reliance and good questions in mentoring situations. We have accumulated a lot of ducks over the years throughout the department, but our Search Technologies…
That’s a heat map of 3 months of Wayfair North American orders, exported via Logstash from our relational orders database into Elasticsearch, and visualized with Kibana 4. For some time now, ELK, or Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana, has been our opensource platform for text-based log messages, complemented by Graphite…
PHP7 is out. This isn’t news. It’s been out since last December, with nine minor revisions since then. What’s new is that it’s serving all of Wayfair’s customer-facing traffic. Performance-wise, PHP7 is the rocket ship people said it would be. We’re nothing but pleased. If you can upgrade, you should do…
There’s a great interview with our own Matt DeGennaro by Paul Krill of Infoworld that came out a few days ago. The topic is Tungsten.js, our awesome framework that ‘lights up’ the DOM with fast, virtual-DOM-based updates, React-style, and can be integrated with Backbone.js and pretty much whatever other framework…
For the past couple years, Wayfair’s front-end stack has relied heavily on Mustache templates. They’ve let our growing front-end team focus on the front-end. They allow us to share more code between server and client as we push towards a Tungsten-powered future. Anyone who’s seen a Mustache template knows that…
Performance is top priority here at Wayfair, because improved performance means an improved customer experience. A significant piece of web performance is the time it takes to render, or generate, the markup for a page. Over the last several months we’ve worked hard to improve the render performance on our…
Cari, who is a developer on our SEO team, just wrote a Chrome extension that’s up on both github (https://github.com/wayfair/nofollow_highlighter) and the Chrome web store (click here to add to Chrome). If you don’t know this subject matter, here’s a classic explanation from Matt Cutts of Google, from a few…
Matt DeGennaro and Andrew Rota of our Javascript team recently spoke at the BostonJS meetup on a library we have written called Tungstenjs, which we have opensourced today. It takes the fast-virtual-dom-update idea from React.js and makes it usable with other frameworks, including Backbone.js. It ships with a Backbone adapter….
I wrote a post last year on consistent hashing for Redis and Memcached with ketama: http://engineering.wayfair.com/consistent-hashing-with-memcached-or-redis-and-a-patch-to-libketama/. We’ve evolved our system a lot since then, and I gave a talk about the latest developments at Facebook’s excellent Data@Scale Boston conference in November: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLjryfUZPXU. We have some updates to both design and…
