A few years ago, after reading this blog post by Jeff Atwood, we started handing out rubber ducks to new hires in Wayfair Engineering, to encourage self-reliance and good questions in mentoring situations. We have accumulated a lot of ducks over the years throughout the department, but our Search Technologies group seems to have stockpiled some kind of mother lode. Lately, they have been producing a new Game-of-Thrones-themed diorama, made of rubber ducks, every week. The one this week was particularly awesome:
Another shot of the same scene seems to have gone a bit viral on Reddit. Cung Tran, whom you may know from this blog post about visual search, may do more for tech recruiting at Wayfair than anyone else this year.
But our connection to Game of Thrones doesn't stop there. Do you like your Daenerys Targaryen jank-free and with impressive uptime like we do? Wayfair engineering may actually be helping with that. We opensourced a C++ port of Etsy's excellent statsd a while back, and wrote about it here. We are now looking at a pull request on github from rrusso1982 from the HBOCodeLabs fork of it. He rightly points out that although we came very close to making a complete drop-in replacement for statsd, there were a couple of missing pieces that didn't happen to be important to us at the time. And he has fixed those right up. It's great to see that.
Update: And... merged in! Actually, it was merged in before I published this. Our distributed systems team moves too fast for me to keep up. Heh.
