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April 1, 2013
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.
March 27, 2013
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.
February 5, 2013
Data Warehousing at Wayfair
By  bshaw
February 5, 2013
Wayfair was invited to be a sponsor at this year’s Beanpot Hackathon (link: http://www.hackbeanpot.com/), held last week at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge. The concept of a hackathon is so closely related to our core values, that we jumped at the opportunity to participate. Wylie Conlon, along with others from the nuACM (link: http://acm.ccs.neu.edu/), did a great job organizing this event.
By  Dan R.
December 17, 2012
We've received a few online, and in person questions like this, so i figured it was probably worth explaining in a little more detail.
December 11, 2012
Last winter we were discussing all of our upcoming projects, and what they would require for new hardware in the datacenter. Then we took a look at the space we had in our cage space at our main datacenter. Turns out, we didn’t have enough space, and the facility wouldn’t give us any more power in the current footprint we had. There was also no room to expand our cage. We had two basic options, one would have been to add additional cage space either in the same building, or even another facility and rely on cross connects or WAN connections. We weren’t wild about this approach because we knew it would come back to bite us later as we continuously fought with the concept, and had to decide which systems should be in which space. The other option was to move entirely into a bigger footprint. We opted to stay in the same facility, which made moving significantly easier, and moved to a space that is 70% larger then our old space, giving us lots of room as we grow. Another major driver in the decision to move entirely was that it afforded us the opportunity to completely redo our network infrastructure from the ground up to have a much more modular setup and finally using 10Gb everywhere in our core and aggregation layers.
October 5, 2012
We use the Apache SOLR search platform behind the scenes at Wayfair. Sometimes, when vanilla SOLR doesn't quite do what we want, we improve it for our purposes. When we suspect that others might have the same purposes, and we think that we have solved our problems in a generally useful way, we contribute our solutions back to the open source community, either on github, or through a more project-specific distribution channel. SOLR is an Apache project, so for SOLR, this means attaching a patch to a 'Jira'. This blog post is about SOLR Jira 1093.
September 28, 2012
These days, in the big data community, we often hear how biologists have adopted and are using distributed computing technologies that were first introduced to solve problems in software engineering. The fact that Wayfair has done the inverse and used a tool initially developed to help biologists cluster similar proteins together to solve a problem in e-commerce, piqued the curiosity of Information Week magazine, who asked us for an interview about our February blog post on using Markov clustering for generating recommendations http://tech.wayfair.com/recommendations-with-markov-clustering/. Read the interview here https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/online-retailer-uses-dna-research-to-connect-with-customers/d/d-id/1106475