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.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Custom Module Loading in a Node.js Environment

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 loader in order to have complete sandboxing between requests, with much less chance of accidental data leaks.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Object Detection and Visual Search Improvements

Last year, Wayfair launched Visual Search, a new and novel way to find products on our website. Users can now upload photos of furniture they like and find visually similar matches in an instant. If you need a little refresher on this technology, the original blog post can be found here.

Wayfair Tech Blog

React Finland 2018 Tour Diary

Last month, the inaugural React Finland Conference was held on April 24–26 in Helsinki, Finland’s capital. It was the first ever React conference in Finland, and I was lucky enough to present a workshop there on component-driven development. Having React as a framework of choice at Wayfair, this was a great opportunity to share my knowledge as well as pick up some useful learnings from other members of the React community.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Debunking the 4 Myths of a Career Transition from PhD to Data Science

Since I began my tenure at Wayfair as a data scientist, many PhD students and postdocs have reached out to ask for advice about the transition to data science in industry. After a fruitful collection of conversations, I’ve realized that there are popular misconceptions about what it means to be a data scientist.