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…
The Lucas Critique, named after economist Robert Lucas, is a theoretical result that blew up the discipline of macroeconomics in the 1970s, and its implications are directly relevant to much of the work that data scientists are doing today—including work that I am doing on the Algorithms team at Wayfair!……
At Wayfair, we do everything we can to help our customers find exactly the products they need to furnish their homes in the style they envision. But creating all of the necessary elements to allow them to do that is not as easy as one might think. Right now, if……
When you walk into a company like Wayfair, it can feel overwhelming. There are more than 2,300 engineers across the organization. Every person you talk to seems smarter than the last. Staff engineers are responsible for famous open source libraries and massive technical achievements. It can definitely be a scary…
Understanding price effects is of high importance to any business, but usually it’s not easy to measure. To do this, Wayfair’s algorithms team has been designing modeling and experimental approaches so that we can disentangle the intricate web of causality. In this video, Wayfair Senior Data Scientist Lin Jia explains……
Stylistic preference is an important factor when a home goods customer is deciding which product to buy, but it is very difficult to identify and define. Although designers have established different style categories, labeling a scene as adhering to a particular style is a highly subjective task. Furthermore, customers often……
Introduction When looking for a new piece of furniture to add to a room, customers generally consider two major points: the visual appearance of the new item, and its harmony with the existing furniture inside the room. Together, these two considerations define a customer’s style preferences. Wayfair’s vast product catalog……
This summer, 56 software engineering interns made a massive impact on Wayfair at our Boston headquarters. These talented engineering students, who represent 38 different universities across the country, came together for an incredibly successful 10-week internship. From learning a new tech stack, developing skills in stakeholder management, to attending events…
Wayfair sells over 10 million products on our website. This vast selection ensures that customers have numerous options when shopping for a particular item; but it also makes effective, personalized product recommendations of vital importance in helping our customers find products that are relevant to their interests. This week in……
