Welcome, Wayfairians and open source enthusiasts. In this blog, I will share with you the building of our open-source hub for Wayfair, wayfair.github.io. The site is live right now, and I encourage everyone to visit. You can browse guides on getting started with OSS, read about featured projects we are watching in the Wayfair Open Source Program Office (OSPO); and find some practical tips and guidance which we hope will be of help to the entire OSS community.

Introduction

At Wayfair, we operate at a massive scale, which has led to tremendous growth over the last decade. During this time, we have increased our traffic more than twenty-fold. To keep pace and fulfil our technology platform needs, scaling has been vital. In fact, it’s been at the core of everything we do throughout this timeframe.

Jennifer Phillips and Kristin Filippelli never considered themselves “runners,” but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and gyms closed, they both were in search of ways to keep themselves going. Both are colleagues on the Partner Operations team at Wayfair who partner with Wayfair’s suppliers to provide consumers with the products they love through an exceptional customer experience. When they each found out that they were training for the 2021 Boston Marathon, they joined forces to mobilize their team and amplify their impact.

Interviewing for a new job should be an exciting time, especially when it comes to a company like Wayfair. As you begin looking into a career here, I want to take a moment to emphasize that Wayfair is a great place to work. This starts with our commitment to innovation and constant experimentation, where taking smart risks is encouraged as we all strive to remain on the cutting-edge. Underlying this drive is a universal passion for learning and always providing customers with the most exceptional online experiences possible. Put it all together and what you have is an environment offering you endless opportunities to thrive.

With our global headquarters located in Boston’s Back Bay, we are constantly inspired and energized by the outstanding academic and entrepreneurial work being done all around us. Boston is steeped in history and education — some of its oldest institutions are its world-class universities. By comparison Wayfair is a relative newcomer, yet much like our neighbors in the academic world we’ve shared a love for experimentation and learning since the start.

Customers’ tastes may change over a period of time. How can we leverage their browse history to make sure our recommendations reflect their most up-to-date preferences?

November is Native American Heritage Month in the United States, an opportunity to celebrate the richness of Native and Indigenous history, culture, and traditions. WayNative, Wayfair’s North American Native and Indigenous Employee Resource Group (ERG), focuses on creating an inclusive environment that supports indigenous populations and offers a space for conversation within the community.

As most everyone knows by now, Wayfair is a major e-commerce company focused on furniture and home goods. What you may not be aware of are the many technical elements happening behind the scenes to ensure that 22 million products are delivered to you on time. This is an area I’m familiar with as I work in Wayfair’s International Supply Chain Engineering (ISC) department. A relatively new group, our journey began with a significant realization—we needed to break our monolith into microservices. Specifically, we needed to manage authorization across all of our new microservices. The answer was the Oso authorization framework. For this blog, I’ll walk through the steps we took to make these changes. This includes how we initially broke apart our monorepo, the process of writing a proof of concept with Oso, and how we moved to production with the support and collaboration of Oso’s engineers.

If you've searched on Google or Bing for an item to make your home just right for you, and came across an ad for Wayfair, then you've already experienced our Wayfair Ads Bidding Platform in action! This post dives into the details of why we built this platform, how it evolved, its core building blocks, and plans for future enhancements.