Jonathan K.

Jonathan is a Senior Software Engineer at Wayfair. He leads the Web Performance team, which focuses on performance and scalability projects. In his free time he likes to play Ultimate, travel, and read web performance blogs (yeah, really). You can find him on Twitter @jonathanklein, and if you are in the Boston area be sure to check out the Boston Web Performance Meetup group that Jonathan started!

Wayfair Tech Blog

Northeast PHP Recap

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!

1 Min Read

Wayfair Tech Blog

Measuring CDN Performance Benefits with Real Users

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.

3 Min Read

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.

2 Min Read

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.

5 Min Read

Wayfair Tech Blog

September 2011 Site Performance Report

I recently saw this post on Etsy's blog and found it inspiring - you don't typically see retailers (or any companies for that matter) sharing performance data. Even more impressive is the fact that they posted this on their primary blog as opposed to their engineering blog. To me this says that Etsy really cares about performance, and wants all of their customers to be aware that it is a priority. After reading that post I immediately wanted to share some Wayfair data - and this is my attempt to do that (maybe I can get it cross-posted to our main blog :-)).

2 Min Read