Wayfair Tech Blog

TechJam 2015

Come hang out with us tomorrow, June 11th, from 4 pm to 9 pm, at TechJam. Not to be too transparent, but we're hiring! We will be at booth 43, bostontechjam@wayfair.com, #btj2015. Steve Conine, Wayfair Founder and CTO, and I will be there, along with a bunch of our colleagues in Wayfair engineering.

Wayfair Tech Blog

vim emacs talk by Aaron Bieber

I can't believe I'm writing a post about vim and emacs in the year 2015! But our very own Aaron Bieber just spoke at the vim meetup on how he's been secretly using emacs all the time for a few months, and is now coming out of the closet as an emacs user. Vim vs. emacs is an eternal holy war, and pretty much the opposite of a topic that I would normally want to write about. But Aaron is the opposite of a holy warrior, as anyone at Wayfair Engineering can tell you. Here's the announcement of the talk: http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Vim-Meetup/events/222395931/, here's his personal blog post on the topic: http://blog.aaronbieber.com/blog/2015/01/11/learning-to-love-emacs/, and here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc, with cool jazz!

Wayfair Tech Blog

Announcing Tungstenjs

Matt DeGennaro and Andrew Rota of our Javascript team recently spoke at the BostonJS meetup on a library we have written called Tungstenjs, which we have opensourced today. It takes the fast-virtual-dom-update idea from React.js and makes it usable with other frameworks, including Backbone.js. It ships with a Backbone adapter. There's a server-side component too, using npm and Mustache templating, but perhaps I should just let the 'readme' tell you: https://github.com/wayfair/tungstenjs. We've been using it on Wayfair, and it's awesome.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Front end talks

Andrew Rota and Matt DeGennaro of Wayfair Engineering are giving a talk on a Javascript framework we have written at Wayfair called 'Tungsten,' which shares goals and ideas with React.js but interoperates with Backbone, which we use heavily. It's at the BostonJS meetup tonight at Bocoup, with a $5 cover: http://www.meetup.com/boston_JS/events/221038649/, on a double bill with Calvin Metcalf. It should be a great night.

Wayfair Tech Blog

PHP Static Analysis with HHVM and Hussar

Wayfair Engineering places special emphasis on software testing as a means of maintaining stability in production. The DevTools team, which I am a member of, has built and integrated a number of tools into our development and deploy process in order to catch errors as early as possible, especially before they land in master. If you missed it, last week we released sp-phpunit, a script to manage running PHPUnit tests in parallel.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Sweet Parallel PHPUnit

We write a lot of PHP unit tests at Wayfair, and we want to be able to run them as fast as possible, which seems like a good use case for parallelization. Running tests in parallel is not built in to PHPUnit, but there are ways to do it. When we looked we found three: parallel-phpunit, ParaTest, and GNU Parallel. All met some of our needs, but none was exactly what we wanted, so we got to work.

Wayfair Tech Blog

WebPerf on Location Boston, with Jack Wood

Catchpoint is running an event today, called "WebPerf on Location Boston", part of a series of such events in different cities. It starts at 2, and our very own Jack Wood, Wayfair CIO, is speaking at 3:30. Details and the link to register are here. It's at Battery Ventures in the seaport area, and it should be an excellent afternoon.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Web components talk at CSS Dev Conference

Andrew Rota, an engineer in our client technologies group, is speaking in a bit, at the CSS Dev conference in New Orleans, on "Web Components and Modular CSS #components". It's a great talk, about these emerging standards and what's possible to do with them. If you're there, check it out: http://cssdevconf2014.sched.org/. We'll post the links to slides and video when they come out.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Barcamp Boston 2014

Wayfair is a gold sponsor of Barcamp Boston this weekend at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge. Quite a few of us will be there, some speaking. If you've never been, it's a great event.