Augmented reality (AR) is most well known for its use in mobile games, which encourage users to find virtual objects hidden in the world around them. At Wayfair, we leverage AR beyond pure entertainment to provide value for our shoppers. AR lets shoppers answer important questions like, “Will this item…
The Python Platform Team at Wayfair maintains a collection of base Docker images used by all deployed Python applications. Maintaining these base images provides us with the ability to: Standardize our environment (all of our images are based on CentOS) Simplify deployment for application developers (images ship pre-configured to connect…
Introduction Dependency injection has always been a hot topic for debate. At Wayfair, we have always chosen the simpler approach: passing the parameters right into the initializer. While this approach was easy to follow, scalability became a concern once the app started growing to a complicated machinery. Some examples picked…
Catchpoint is running an event today, called “WebPerf on Location Boston”, part of a series of such events in different cities. It starts at 2, and our very own Jack Wood, Wayfair CIO, is speaking at 3:30. Details and the link to register are here. It’s at Battery Ventures in…
Wayfair recently deployed Steelhead WAN optimizers in our network. We were unsatisfied with the 3 (2.5?) main suggested methods of deployment from Riverbed. So we designed our own deployment. But first, the vendor suggested methods: Physical In-Path – Physically puts the device in-line with your traffic, easy deployment, but if…
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…
Last winter we were discussing all of our upcoming projects, and what they would require for new hardware in the datacenter. Then we took a look at the space we had in our cage space at our main datacenter. Turns out, we didn’t have enough space, and the facility wouldn’t…
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 never done. And the DBA team here is a true example of it. We are constantly looking to improve performance and we rigorously tune our databases on a daily basis. We are always looking at ways to have our queries run faster – by maintaining indexes,…
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…
