Wayfair Tech Blog

DevTech Promoters at Wayfair: Taking Ownership of Technical Debt and Overseeing the Health of our Codebase

Moving a couch across multiple countries to land in your living room, a couple of days after placing an order, is a challenging business. The Transportation Engineering team at Wayfair, who look after the transportation portion of our logistics, knows this all too well. This capability has given us a significant competitive advantage and, in the process of building it out, we have inevitably accumulated a considerable amount of what is often referred to as technical debt. Internally, we call this latency work because it is work we must do to reduce the future latency of our engineering efforts.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Announcing BoSRE: Wayfair’s Inaugural Site Reliability Engineering Conference

Ever since Google pioneered the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we’ve seen product reliability, accountability, and assorted innovation in this space skyrocket in importance and scope. At Wayfair, we’ve been working hard to evangelize contemporary solutions to tricky scalability scenarios, investing thoughtfully in cloud enablement and containerization.

Wayfair Tech Blog

The Intern Diaries: At Home for the Summer with Wayfair Engineering

This past summer, Wayfair welcomed 47 software engineering interns to its Boston headquarters. Traveling from 27 different universities across the United States, these interns were immersed in a summer internship that would challenge them to be critical thinkers, innovators, and collaborative team members as they partnered up with engineering teams to solve complex business problems.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Diversity in Tech: Data Science Manager Jen Wang Shares Her Thoughts with ForbesBooks

Workplace diversity is not just an ethical issue. Teams that overcome diversity issues (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, experience) often achieve greater productivity than homogeneous teams. If you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you will be constantly challenged to reexamine facts, think deeper, and explain better. In this way diversity can enhance creativity and boost team performance and technological innovation.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Organizational Refactoring: Making Change to Our Teams in a Human Way

At Wayfair, we know that software engineering is a team sport. Broadly speaking, we organize our engineers into small working teams of anywhere between three to eight people. When you have issues getting application code running on your development machine, or questions about features that your team supports, having that small, tight-knit working group to turn to is invaluable. We also organize these teams of engineers with additional cross-functional members such as product managers, design, QA, and analytics.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair Data Science Hosts 2nd Immersion Program

Top left to right: Yumeng Ma (University of Michigan), Steven Yin (Columbia), Michael Spece, Carnegie Mellon University), Quinn Donahoe (University of Pittsburgh), Cristian Gavrus (UC Berkeley)

Wayfair Tech Blog

Blocking IO in Gunicorn Gevent Workers

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.

Business Colleagues Together Teamwork Working Office

Wayfair Tech Blog

The Python Platform Startup: Building From the Ground Up

A little over a year ago, I found myself taking on a unique and exciting opportunity: Building a Python Platform team from the ground up. Despite its size, Wayfair gives teams a large degree of autonomy in deciding how they operate, which meant we had a true blank slate to start with. Most of my experience has been on product-oriented teams, and this was my first time leading a platform team with purely internal customers. I want to share that journey with you, but first let me give some context around why we needed this team in the first place.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Director Dan Wulin Shares His Data Journey in New Podcast

No two people's paths to Wayfair are exactly the same. On our data science team alone we employ physicists, neuroscientists, biophysical chemists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and more! Our data scientists are united by a love of data and a knack for problem solving, but each person has a different story to tell about how they gained these skills.