When you sit down to write a recommendations system, there are quite a few well-practiced techniques you can use, and it’s difficult to know in advance how well they are going to work out when applied to your data. Thanks to the Netflix prize, which was initiated in 2006……
We run a python/Tornado-based recommendations service behind the scenes at Wayfair. As part of our code deployments, we need to install various third-party libraries to our Tornado servers. The python tools that do this kind of thing are a bit half-baked, so we paper over their inadequacies with puppet. A…
It’s a new year and it’s time for another report on how fast (or slow) our sites are. If you are new here, our previous report looked at the average load time for our four major types of pages, as well as the 95th percentile load time. The inspiration for…
Here at Wayfair, we have thousands of suppliers we work with in order to provide our products to our customers. To automate the bulk of these interactions, we use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), so that we can trade documents back and forth. FTP is still one of the predominant methods…
As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control….
FreeBSD has spent the last few years implementing awesome Solaris-based features such as DTrace and ZFS. Here at Wayfair, we use FreeBSD on our servers and our development environments. As a security engineer for Wayfair, I’m tasked with many fun projects. I get to test out different configurations and applications…
Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules…
One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one…
We certainly take technology seriously around here and work quite hard at trying to get it right, so it definitely means a lot when we’re publically recognized for these efforts. I was therefore quite proud last Thursday night when Wayfair was honored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) by…
If you haven’t already read the overview of our deployment system or the architecture of our deployment server you might want to check those posts out first. In this article I will discuss how we deploy code in a unique way that gives us all the flexibility of the symlink…
If you haven’t heard about the ESC Conference yet, you should check it out! It’s a new conference this year, giving us all another place to congregate and discuss running code and systems at scale. If you’ve been to a devopsdays conference before then you will be familiar with and…
