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…
‘First impressions matter’. While the above statement holds true for the very many aspects of life, it applies to E-commerce platforms as well. Be it an accent chair designed for a neomodern apartment in Manhattan, New York or a double-hanging hammock styled for the patio facing a lush green backyard…
In this article, we will take you on a journey of integrating and leveraging LinkedIn’s Brooklin platform as a mirroring technology to replace Kafka Mirror Makers (KMM). We will explain how we transitioned from configuring, operating, and maintaining 212 distinct Kafka Mirror Maker clusters to only 14 Brooklin clusters to…
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…
If you work in software, this might sound familiar to you: an engineering team has been tasked with designing and building a large, highly visible product or system from the ground up. The team is mostly made up of newer engineers with less institutional knowledge, and the tech lead doesn’t…
Have you ever wanted to be able to simply switch between Internet Service Providers (ISP) dynamically based on network path reliability? Many network engineers will answer yes. This is a common ask in environments of any size. At Wayfair, we rely heavily on the resilience and reliability of our Internet…
Many approaches to ranking a list of products or search results are based on assigning a score to each item and sorting in descending order—in other words, greedy sorting approaches. In e-commerce, predictive models place the product that the customer is most likely to be interested in at the top,……
Meet Nicholas What is your current role? I am the tech lead of the Frontend Framework team on Storefront. What does your team do? How does it fit into the world of Wayfair? The Frontend Framework team is responsible for (1) the core frontend libraries that power Wayfair.com and our…
Introduction Wayfair operates large data-centers in addition to leveraging the public cloud to provide infrastructure services. Over time, Wayfair Infrastructure teams chose to introduce multiple logical zones within a single datacenter to facilitate easier network maintenance and to split the single failure domain into multiple smaller ones. In this article,…
Meet Michael What is your current role? I am currently a Senior Engineer on the Machine Learning Platforms team What does your team do? How does it fit into the world of Wayfair? Data science and machine learning are incredibly complex domains which require expertise in the fields of mathematics,…
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…
