A group of engineers from Wayfair will pause trying to make Halloween pictures in Graphite and stop looking for a ghost in the machine with Skyline this weekend to head over to the 8th reincarnation of BarCampBoston. BarCampBoston is a great example of an unconference. These conferences are filled with…
On the search and recommendations team at Wayfair, we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated men and women of the world. We have speakers of French, Chinese, Hebrew, German and Persian in the crew. Some of us host couchsurfers at our swanky apartments, and then turn around and couchsurf…
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…
Overview There’s storm in Wayfair! And yes, the “a” article before the word “storm” is purposely not there. When referring to “storm” at Wayfair, we do not mean a conglomerate of barometric circumstances that lead to downpours from the skies and other natural phenomena (a storm); we mean real-time computation,…
We’ve used MongoDB at Wayfair for a subset of our customer data for a while. But we’re always looking for opportunities to speed up our infrastructure and give our customers a more responsive user experience. So when we heard about a new database platform called ‘/dev/null’, we became pretty excited….
When our company’s co-founder encouraged all of our Engineering department to participate in the Google Glass Explorer contest, I thought about project ideas that could help people by using the unique features of this new augmented-reality technology. I remembered a project that some fellow students did during a robotics class…
Data Warehousing at Wayfair In 2009 Wayfair’s database infrastructure was based almost entirely on Microsoft SQL Server. Our Business Intelligence team was using a SQL Server data warehouse to prepare a large amount of data for import into Analysis Services (SSAS) each day. We populated our data warehouse using transaction log shipping from production…
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…
We’ve received a few online, and in person questions like this, so i figured it was probably worth explaining in a little more detail. On the Deployment server, we have a variety of applications that we deploy. From Windows .Net Services, Python, Classic ASP, CSS/JS and PHP to name a few….
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…
Me: Doug, what are you doing? Doug: Solving the problem of class struggle with one of Greg’s classifiers. Me: Karl Marx should call his office. What do you mean by that? Doug: Let me explain… Class struggle at Wayfair search used to manifest itself as searches for ‘red cups’ that returned……
