Introduction At Wayfair, we have typically discussed scalability from an infrastructure perspective—for example, when considering how many servers to provision for an upcoming holiday season, our usual response has been to calculate based on customer volume projections from the marketing team. However, while this source of data is no doubt…
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…
Introduction The main objective of our recommender systems is to narrow down Wayfair’s vast catalogue to assist customers in finding exactly the products they want. Most recommendation algorithms leverage a customer’s browsing history, which includes various types of interactions with products, such as clicks, add-to-cart actions, and orders. The diversity……
Wayfair has its traditions when it comes to business: It’s rooted in e-commerce through and through. Having been at Wayfair for more than three years with our iOS team, I was able to be part of many stages of growth and expansion, right up to my most recent challenge: Building…
Introduction Every day, Wayfair receives tens of thousands of messages from customers, telling us about their experiences with our products and services through the likes of product reviews, return comments, and various surveys. Considering that our customers spend valuable time writing these, it is fair to assume that they have……
Choosing between school and work can be an either-or proposition for many, whether for financial reasons or because there simply don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. When faced with this decision myself, I initially shared similar concerns. However, I soon found that at Wayfair this can be……
Reliable outbound fulfillment, inventory replenishment, and positioning are all fundamental to creating an online purchase experience that delights our customers with rapid home delivery. As a result of our commitment to this reliability, we strive to offer one and two-day delivery times when possible, sharpen customer pricing, lower fulfillment costs,…
Introduction Uplift models predict the incremental effect of a treatment on the outcome of an individual. In other words, they answer the causal question of how an individual’s behavior will change if we give him/her a specific treatment. At Wayfair, we build uplift models to inform us of whom to……
On August 2nd, Wayfair Engineering hosted our second annual Community Coding Day. You can read about our first annual Community Coding Day here and a complimentary school-year program that I built, called ENGage, here. Our goal for these programs is to expose students from under-served communities to Computer Science and…
Wayfair merchandisers currently spend thousands of hours each year manually naming the millions of products we sell. This unstructured data is costly to maintain and subject to human error as individuals currently update a free text field. With Formulaic Naming, Wayfair is transitioning to a structured solution for naming based…
State machines – they’ve been around for a long time in computer science, but are perhaps forgotten in the last few decades, at least in mobile apps. My team at Wayfair chose to revisit state machines and give them a try in our production app. This is how we came…
