Kotlin… Developers are clamoring for it. Some are calling it the future of Android Development. Others are claiming it lacks the tooling to make it “production” ready. At Wayfair, we decided to give Kotlin a try and come to our own conclusions. Initially, we used it for our “debug” features….
Here at Wayfair, we believe complexity theory to be valuable and quite helpful in terms of data center builds. In particular, there are certain ways we can use this theorem to prevent outages in the future. There will forever be unpredictable events – how do we assess their difficulty or…
In the Wayfair Network Operations Center (NOC) we wear a lot of hats: Code Deployers, Debuggers, Production Triage, and Incident Coordination, to name a few. Just this month we’ve responded to an average of 256 alerts a day and are staffed 24×7 with a team spanning two continents, servicing several…
Multiple recommendation systems at Wayfair use collaborative filtering based models to understand user behavior and identify like-minded customers. Despite its success, collaborative filtering has a few significant drawbacks, such as the cold start problem and a limited scope of recommendable products. By leveraging image based product embeddings, Wayfair has created…
Wayfair offers a zillion things home, with one of the world’s largest online selections of furniture, home furnishings, décor and goods, including more than eight million products from over 10,000 suppliers. Wayfair’s expanding Visual Search team is leveraging deep learning and our expansive catalog of images to create an exciting…
At Wayfair, technology and data expertise enable data scientists to transform new web datasets into intelligent machine algorithms that re-imagine how traditional commerce works. In this post, we introduce how visual tools like Violin Plots amplify our data acumen to unlock deep insights. The savvy data scientist recognizes the value…
3D Rendering at Wayfair Wayfair uses 3D modeling in place of traditional photography to generate 2D images for thousands of products. In place of the physical entailments of traditional photography, we create models using Autodesk’s 3DS Max. Models are submitted to a QA tool we built where analysts can communicate…
This past weekend, Wayfair hosted the first-ever ReactJS conference on the East Coast. ReactBoston was a two-day whirlwind of talks on everything from the popular and pressing (React Fiber) to the unexpected and astounding (piloting drones with React; that sound you hear is the audience’s collective jaw hitting the floor)….
Exaptation is an evolutionary term, where a trait that is evolved to serve one function subsequently serves another. To quote Dave Snowden, “Dinosaurs did not throw themselves out of trees and hope to eventually evolve wings.” Feathers were part of warmth, and maybe mating, but eventually this novel idea of…
In this first blog post focused on marketing attribution & measurement, we share insights on how Wayfair has leveraged a unique combination of geographic splitting and optimization techniques to measure the performance of our various marketing channels Key article takeaways: Geographic splitting is a convenient and generally applicable tool…
Wayfair Engineering is excited to host and organize the first react.js conference in New England on September 23-24, 2017 here at our headquarters in Boston’s Back Bay. Over the last year we’ve partnered with ReactJS Boston, the local react user group, to sponsor and host react meetup events nearly every…
