Engineering

A closer look at engineering’s role in Wayfair’s design system, Homebase

Feature Toggles (sometimes referred to as Feature Flags) have revolutionized software development by allowing features within a software product to be enabled individually or disabled at any point, even after they’ve been rolled out to customers. Feature Toggles at Wayfair boost productivity and provide teams with complete control over when and how to make new capabilities available to end users.

As with many e-commerce companies, recommender systems are widely used at Wayfair to show the most relevant products to customers at every stage of their shopping journey. Machine learning models used in recommender systems typically optimize for metrics related to customer satisfaction: actions such as clicks, conversions and Add-to-Cart. My talk at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) was related to how Wayfair is utilizing inputs from our supply chain to influence the products we showcase to consumers as they search and browse our storefront.

“My job involves making highly business critical technical decisions,” says Alex Maclinovsky. “In my role, I have to go through a large number of technical documents, presentations and make a lot of time-sensitive decisions.”

Wayfair recently celebrated a significant milestone. I’ll give you a hint-it was featured in a roundup of the top 20 innovations from Wayfair’s first two decades of operation. The answer is Wayfair’s new homegrown warehouse management system (WMS), Nexus.

Innovative businesses are always in search of new features and solutions that can transform the customer experience. When a new idea emerges, developers will often work at an accelerated pace, taking calculated shortcuts to prove the value of the concept in as short a time as possible. At this point, the mantra is, “Why exhaust long cycles on something that may ultimately fall short of expectation?”

If you're a Wayfair customer or supplier, you have received our promotional and transactional messages. These come in a variety of flavors. For promotions, it could be a Thanksgiving/Black Friday sale or a Summer/July 4th deal. With transactional messages, the focus is on areas such as order updates, shipment confirmations, and cart abandonment messages.

When I first started learning about web development, I discovered an instant infatuation with design. I would scroll endlessly through Dribble, thinking that everything on there felt perfect and was in an untouchable realm of its own – one I didn’t feel worthy of entering. I think that’s in part why I was drawn to web development – I wanted to be in the presence of designers and get to touch those (seemingly) infallible creations they produced. My curiosity for both development and design eventually led me down a path of learning and self-discovery, a path which brought me to my current role as a creative technologist. If that name is new to you (or perhaps sounds like what programmers in the 1940s were called), I’m right there with you! I’m still getting used to it and discovering what the role is myself, so come along and I’ll share what I’ve uncovered in these dark and inky corridors!

Have you considered contributing to open-source software but were not sure what the work entails? Maybe you heard some people even get paid to work on open source and are curious about where to begin. A good first step is to understand the common challenges and pitfalls that come with open-sourcing a new library, so you can avoid them. Come join me and the rest of the Dynamic Services team on our journey...to open source!

Machine learning (ML) profoundly transformed the digital shopping experience for millions of people worldwide. We’ve seen this at Wayfair, where our teams are continuously delivering intelligent and improved experiences for our customers by integrating ML at every stage of their journey with us. Right now Wayfair is leveraging hundreds of ML applications, which on the outside are improving marketing campaigns, improving the visual merchandising of the products we sell, personalizing product recommendations, enabling high-quality customer service, and more.

At Wayfair, we operate at a massive scale, which has led to tremendous growth over the last decade. During this time, we have increased our traffic more than twenty-fold. To keep pace and fulfil our technology platform needs, scaling has been vital. In fact, it’s been at the core of everything we do throughout this timeframe.

As most everyone knows by now, Wayfair is a major e-commerce company focused on furniture and home goods. What you may not be aware of are the many technical elements happening behind the scenes to ensure that 22 million products are delivered to you on time. This is an area I’m familiar with as I work in Wayfair’s International Supply Chain Engineering (ISC) department. A relatively new group, our journey began with a significant realization—we needed to break our monolith into microservices. Specifically, we needed to manage authorization across all of our new microservices. The answer was the Oso authorization framework. For this blog, I’ll walk through the steps we took to make these changes. This includes how we initially broke apart our monorepo, the process of writing a proof of concept with Oso, and how we moved to production with the support and collaboration of Oso’s engineers.