Wayfair Tech Blog

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Recommendations with Simple Correlation Metrics on Implied Preference Data

When you sit down to write a recommendations system, there are quite a few well-practiced techniques you can use, and it's difficult to know in advance how well they are going to work out when applied to your data. Thanks to the Netflix prize, which was initiated in 2006 and awarded in 2009, a lot has been written on recommender systems for the Netflix data set. If you happen to have a product catalogue similar to Netflix's (those movies from the 60s are still being viewed and rated), and your users happen to have scored it with a 5-point explicit ratings system, there are some awesome advanced techniques and frameworks that you can take for a spin. Does that sound like you? Show of hands? I didn't think so. Our data is certainly nothing like that.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Puppet provider for python library installation

We run a python/Tornado-based recommendations service behind the scenes at Wayfair. As part of our code deployments, we need to install various third-party libraries to our Tornado servers. The python tools that do this kind of thing are a bit half-baked, so we paper over their inadequacies with puppet.

Wayfair Tech Blog

MySQL Virtual Directories for Pure-FTPd

Here at Wayfair, we have thousands of suppliers we work with in order to provide our products to our customers. To automate the bulk of these interactions, we use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), so that we can trade documents back and forth. FTP is still one of the predominant methods for transferring these documents, so we have had to build a robust FTP solution to handle this traffic.

Wayfair Tech Blog

SVN Commit Hooks For a Better Codebase

As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control. By having a few key checks we can prevent bugs, ensure consistent coding practices, and generally have a cleaner codebase.

Wayfair Tech Blog

FreeBSD ZFS Boot Environments

FreeBSD has spent the last few years implementing awesome Solaris-based features such as DTrace and ZFS. Here at Wayfair, we use FreeBSD on our servers and our development environments. As a security engineer for Wayfair, I'm tasked with many fun projects. I get to test out different configurations and applications in FreeBSD. Naturally, I set up a FreeBSD 8-STABLE VM to do my testing.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Switching from Classic ASP to PHP

One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all...we're still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one that our founders were familiar with. After 8 years of working with it, we had pushed it to the limits and decided we'd get more benefit out of moving to a new technology.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair is Recognized for Technology Achievement by MassTLC

We certainly take technology seriously around here and work quite hard at trying to get it right, so it definitely means a lot when we’re publically recognized for these efforts. I was therefore quite proud last Thursday night when Wayfair was honored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) by being named “2011 Company of the Year” among privately held companies.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair Code Deployment, Part 3

If you haven’t already read the overview of our deployment system or the architecture of our deployment server you might want to check those posts out first.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Have you heard about ESC Conference 2011?

If you haven't heard about the ESC Conference yet, you should check it out!