A few weeks ago, we celebrated Inc! Magazine’s great cover story about us, including an internal poll of our favorite item from the photo shoot (results: tie between the purple dragon and giant giraffe). Unbeknownst to us, however, the story was later picked up by Yahoo!’s news feed on April…
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…
As has been discussed at great length on this blog recently, performance is a key part of the work we do here at Wayfair. Recently, we’ve been putting a lot of extra effort into our technology developments to make our pages load faster and more reliably. One of the most…
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…
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,…
Our story begins in Holland in 1997, where a researcher named Stijn van Dongen, who is pretty good at Go, has a 5-minute flash of insight into modeling flows with stochastic matrices. He writes a thesis about it and makes a toolkit called MCL with a free software license. Flash……
When you sit down to write a recommendations system, there are quite a few well-practiced techniques you can use, and it’s difficult to know in advance how well they are going to work out when applied to your data. Thanks to the Netflix prize, which was initiated in 2006……
We run a python/Tornado-based recommendations service behind the scenes at Wayfair. As part of our code deployments, we need to install various third-party libraries to our Tornado servers. The python tools that do this kind of thing are a bit half-baked, so we paper over their inadequacies with puppet. A…
It’s a new year and it’s time for another report on how fast (or slow) our sites are. If you are new here, our previous report looked at the average load time for our four major types of pages, as well as the 95th percentile load time. The inspiration for…
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…
As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control….
