1. Introduction In the last century, scholars across a variety of fields have explored the mathematics of decision-making, or learning to intervene within a system. A challenge that relies on decision-making is fundamentally different, and more complex, than a classification problem. For example, designing a machine to distinguish a photo…
Part I: How to build tools that you can hand off to data scientists [feature of Hoover tool] Summary Business moves fast and data science runways are long. What can we do to remove friction and iterate on data science models as quickly as possible? In this two-part blog……
Tests are an invaluable tool for me and my team, I consider them to be a key piece of my engineering toolbelt that I’ve built up over the years. At Wayfair, teams use tests to maintain code quality, as a test-driven development tool, and as a way to self-document new…
Like many companies, Wayfair has leveraged Active Directory (AD) to centrally manage authentication as well as user and computer objects. Schema updates, Organization Unit structure changes, and Group Policy sprawl has led to a vast number of interdependencies and unnecessary complexity. Additionally, a large swath of our infrastructure is tied…
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are industry standard, best practices for web-scale software engineering. Wayfair has practiced CI for well over a decade, although the ways in which we have performed it have changed over time. I’m here to share with you the system we have built to coordinate…
Introduction If you are a Wayfair customer looking for some wall art to decorate your house, chances are you will land on our wall art SuperBrowse page (see image below or link here). This page shows a grid of 48 products, all of which are pieces of wall art. Those……
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…
When people think of Wayfair, they often think of the slick website, catchy TV ads, and personable customer service. They also obviously think of furniture. What they don’t think about, however, is how that furniture gets to the customer. Many people don’t realize that UPS and FedEx won’t bring a…
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….
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…
