A couple of weeks ago I ran a test with WebPagetest that was designed to quantify how much a CDN improves performance for users that are far from your origin. Unfortunately, the test indicated that there was no material performance benefit to having a CDN in place. This conclusion sparked…
In part 1 of this 2-part series we used a comic strip to depict Python programmers and web operations folk working together to figure out how to deploy some scientific computing to an e-commerce site. Joking aside, let’s describe exactly what were were trying to accomplish, and how we did…
Python is my favorite computer language for data science, but it is a poorly standardized beast when it comes to packaging, deployment, web operations, etc. There are plenty of people who are deploying Python code to the web effectively, but especially in the data science area, there is no equivalent…
At Wayfair Engineering, we’re not just proud of the elegant technical solutions we implement, but we’re also proud of our team. As part of our team bonding, we have frequent “Pod Outings,” activities that can be organized by any member of the Engineering team. Some recent Pod Outings have included…
It started as a proof of concept prototype in the fall of 2010. The idea came from a meeting where we were discussing the porting of our storefront codebase from classic ASP to PHP. One of the discussion points was how to avoid simply porting the same logic from one…
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……
