Wayfair Tech Blog

Open Source `Extra-Model`: Semantic Groupings for Better Customer Feedback

Wayfair is an international company with a presence in multiple countries: US, Canada, UK, and Germany. And where our UK customer might look to purchase a “heater”, our US customer might use the term “radiator” to describe the same thing. We want to ensure we’re able to understand that both customers are referring to the same item and interpret feedback left by customers in the form of product reviews correctly.

Wayfair Tech Blog

The Road to the Cloud — Part 2: Plan and Go Big

In the previous installment, we talked about testing smaller components first, expanding the scope gradually, and learning more about the platform of choice in the process.

Wayfair Tech Blog

DS Hackathon Spotlight: The Voice of Wayfair in a Generative Text Model

In early August, the Data Science (DS) team put on their first DS-wide hackathon. The global hackathon event brought together Boston and Berlin based data scientists for one day of hacking and demos. The event challenged teams to think big about how algorithms can transform Wayfair’s business and help unveil unseen possibilities. Some successful tools and products on our site, like our Visual Search tool, started as hackathon projects! The hackathon is a fun challenge to try out new methods or algorithms, explore a different part of the business, and collaborate with team members across disciplines.

Wayfair Tech Blog

The Road to the Cloud — Part 1: Test and Learn

Have you ever wondered how engineering teams tackle the challenge of ensuring reliability and performance amid increasing site traffic? If so, I hope the information in this four-part series will be of interest to you.

A photograph of Wayfair Engineer Adam Carlson smiling at the camera with his hands in his pockets.

Wayfair Tech Blog, Tech & Innovation, Community Engagement, Workplace

How a Wayfair Engineer's Side Project is Making a Big Impact

During the Presidential campaign season in America, it can be almost impossible to escape the near constant coverage and conversations surrounding the premiere candidates and their positions on the issues. However, as voters look further down the ballot, they’ll find lesser-known candidates in local races who don’t receive the same kind of national attention that Presidential candidates do. As a result, voters may find themselves uninformed on those candidates' views and unsure of who they’d prefer to vote for.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Your Engineering Leadership Journey in a Nutshell

Before we start: despite my best efforts, this text contains many so-called male default terms, like leader, officer, or manager, which although they are generally believed to be gender-neutral, are considered by most men and sadly also the majority of women as male. I am therefore using pronouns when a male default term appears in the text for the first time.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Case Study: Using Storybook to Enhance our Frontend Developer Experience

Here at Wayfair Engineering, we're aggressively migrating our monolithic systems into decoupled (independent) libraries and microservices. Decoupled libraries and services allow us to build faster and deploy more frequently, but they can create discoverability and software testing challenges. In this blog post, we'll show you how we used Storybook to solve some of those problems for our frontend codebase.

Wayfair Tech Blog

What Does an Architect Do?

Taking on a new role can be an experience that is at once career-definingly thrilling, and a bit nerve-wracking. The inevitable questions of one’s own ability start to creep into mind -- “I feel like I only just hit my stride in my last role! Why am I changing everything now?” or “What makes you qualified to be a [your fancy new role here]? You’ve never done that before!” With time, those doubts typically disperse as you remember the reason you pursued your new role in the first place: you’re passionate about the work (and, as it eventually turns out, you’re not half bad at it).

Wayfair Tech Blog

Understanding Envoy Rate Limits

Envoy rate limits is a fairly complex system, built using multiple components. While there are many articles on the Internet explaining basic setup and how each component works, we weren’t able to find something that explains how each component works end-to-end in simple terms.