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…
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…
Domain-specific languages (DSLs) – are they worth the hype? In a recent investigation, our Berlin-based Android Team were looking to further optimize Wayfair’s Android app, and were looking around for options. With the inconvenience of creating a UI in XML, and the appeal of a language that focuses on a…
The App Platforms Team at Wayfair, empowering a team of more than 60 mobile developers with efficient tooling and processes, has been actively looking at the performance of it’s mobile offerings, turning this into more focused work in the past few months. We wanted to involve as many of the…
Wayfair’s software engineering history demonstrates a common theme throughout its time: It moves fast and is a core trait of our business. To create and support the right foundations, we need our infrastructure to move faster than our ideas, and this is especially true for our hybrid environment objectives in…
In September, Wayfair hosted React Boston 2018, two full days of augmented reality demos, beautiful and surprising web animations, DOM-related horror stories (with mostly happy endings), component kits, game shows, Forbidden Planet references, and more, all made possible by ReactJS. This year picked up on several of the themes introduced…
As part of the Python Platform Team here at Wayfair, I help support Wayfair’s 100+ Python engineers and data scientists. We’re the go-to team when it comes to better leveraging Python within the Wayfair Tech ecosystem. During some recent project work, we recently investigated a production issue with a Flask…
Early in 2017, in the course of deciding to convert to React as our frontend framework, we realized we needed to render our React components on the server. We adapted Airbnb’s open source Hypernova renderer for our purposes. In particular, we implemented custom module resolution and modified the Hypernova module…
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…
PHP7 is out. This isn’t news. It’s been out since last December, with nine minor revisions since then. What’s new is that it’s serving all of Wayfair’s customer-facing traffic. Performance-wise, PHP7 is the rocket ship people said it would be. We’re nothing but pleased. If you can upgrade, you should do…
On the search and recommendations team at Wayfair, we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated men and women of the world. We have speakers of French, Chinese, Hebrew, German and Persian in the crew. Some of us host couchsurfers at our swanky apartments, and then turn around and couchsurf…
