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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
August 15, 2012
Last weekend was the inaugural run of the Northeast PHP Conference in Boston. Wayfair was a gold sponsor, so we bought t-shirts, paid for apps and beer at the Saturday night event, and also sent about 15 engineers to the event. I gave a talk on High Performance PHP, and we had a blast. Check out the slides from my talk. The feedback was great, and we look forward to sponsoring the conference again next year!
July 19, 2012
A couple of weeks ago I ran a test with WebPagetest that was designed to quantify how much a CDN improves performance for users that are far from your origin. Unfortunately, the test indicated that there was no material performance benefit to having a CDN in place. This conclusion sparked a lively discussion in the comments and on Google+, with the overwhelming suggestion being that Real User Monitoring data was necessary to draw a firm conclusion about the impact of CDNs on performance. To gather this data I turned to the Insight product and its "tagging" feature.
July 10, 2012
In part 1 of this 2-part series we used a comic strip to depict Python programmers and web operations folk working together to figure out how to deploy some scientific computing to an e-commerce site. Joking aside, let's describe exactly what were were trying to accomplish, and how we did it.
May 8, 2012
At Wayfair Engineering, we’re not just proud of the elegant technical solutions we implement, but we’re also proud of our team. As part of our team bonding, we have frequent “Pod Outings,” activities that can be organized by any member of the Engineering team. Some recent Pod Outings have included a trip to play aerial dodgeball at SkyZone, a paintball outing where we honed our squad tactics, a relaxing day of golf, and our recurring breakfast club before work. Sometimes the best outings are the ones we host at our offices, as we recently did when we decked out our 24th floor with food, beer, and every gaming system we could lay our hands on.