Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair at Boston TechJam 2014

Wayfair engineering will be out in force at Boston TechJam 2014, on Thursday, June 12, 2014, at Boston City Hall Plaza, starting at 4 pm. We'll be in the middle row, one slot away from the beer tent, and we will have some fun stuff, including a giant game of Jenga. You can meet Steve Conine, co-founder, owner, chairman and CTO of Wayfair, as well as other engineering team members. If you don't know Wayfair engineering, we're an intense but friendly team of ~300 people, at the largest and fastest-growing e-commerce company in Boston. We used to call ourselves the biggest Boston tech company you've never heard of, but that's all changing fast. Come and hang out with us!

Wayfair Tech Blog

Consistent hashing with Memcached or Redis, and a patch to libketama

Summary

Wayfair Tech Blog

Exchange 2010 Upgrade: The Archiving Edition

Over this past summer, Wayfair upgraded from Exchange 2007 to a new, highly available, Exchange 2010 email environment. With it brought many improvements, but with these enhancements came new methods for performing common tasks. One operation affected by the upgrade was the mailbox export process. To export a mailbox in Exchange 2007, one would simply grant the engineer or process performing this task administrative rights to the target mailbox and run the PowerShell command:

Wayfair Tech Blog

PHP APC and Handling Dynamic Inheritance Opcodes

Wayfair Tech Blog

BarCampBoston is so good it's spooky!

A group of engineers from Wayfair will pause trying to make Halloween pictures in Graphite and stop looking for a ghost in the machine with Skyline this weekend to head over to the 8th reincarnation of BarCampBoston.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Dynamic WAN Optimizer Routing

Wayfair recently deployed Steelhead WAN optimizers in our network. We were unsatisfied with the 3 (2.5?) main suggested methods of deployment from Riverbed. So we designed our own deployment. But first, the vendor suggested methods:

Wayfair Tech Blog

/dev/null vs. MongoDB benchmark bake-off

We've used MongoDB at Wayfair for a subset of our customer data for a while. But we're always looking for opportunities to speed up our infrastructure and give our customers a more responsive user experience. So when we heard about a new database platform called '/dev/null', we became pretty excited. We can't post a link, because it's in a very private beta testing phase, but we can assure you that the stealth-mode startup that's working on it is supported by a pair of high-class Silicon Valley VCs. The technology is supposed to be too cutting-edge for stodgy Boston, so we felt pretty lucky to be included. /dev/null is web scale, we heard, and it supports sharding! The slashes in the name certainly give it an edgy feel. IMHO it's a bold move to name it that, because of the potential for gfail (weird names doing badly in Google search) and unexpected placement in alphabetical lists. But hey, as an NYC cabbie character said in Taxi Driver, they're way ahead of us out there in California.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Proposal to Control Wheelchairs with Google Glass

When our company's co-founder encouraged all of our Engineering department to participate in the Google Glass Explorer contest, I thought about project ideas that could help people by using the unique features of this new augmented-reality technology. I remembered a project that some fellow students did during a robotics class that I took in graduate school. It used eye-tracking technology to remotely control the motors on a vehicle. After confirming that Google planned to embed eye-tracking technology in their new product, I realized this idea could work for applications such as wheelchairs.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Tesla: Feel the Power

Data Warehousing at Wayfair