The opinion that software will soon dominate and radically change every aspect of everyone’s lives has become so commonplace, and repeated so frequently, that those of us in the tech industry treat it as a statement of fact. A less heralded but more concrete fact is that much of the productivity gains expected from the introduction of computer technologies have not been realized.
How to organize an office so everyone working there can be comfortable and productive is the topic of much discussion. A common strategy is to seat people by their team or sub-team membership. Another strategy which we have been employing is to simply allocate people randomly. Building upon these experiences we've developed a new seating allocation tool "seetd", that allows us to frame this as an optimization problem. We're now free to combine these and other approaches objectively.
Next up in our “Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture” series we’ll talk about dealing with highly normalized data that spans many tables and services, or otherwise has a large object graph that reaches beyond just a simple database, by caching a denormalized version of it.
In this installment of our “Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture” series, we’re going to talk about a complex concept called idempotency, and a technique you can apply to your service design to ensure that requested work is only performed once.
R is an awesome tool for doing data science interactively, but has some defaults that make us worry about using it in production pipelines.
We have an innate and uncontrollable urge to explain things - even when there is nothing to explain. This post explores why we are prone to narrative fallacies. We start at an epic moment in sports history, Steph Curry breaking the record for most 3-pointers in a game, and draw conclusions for better decision making in business.
This entry in our “Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture” is a very common one, but it bears discussion. It’s running code in a background process, instead of in a synchronous request a Consumer might be waiting on.
Dora helps data scientists at Stitch Fix visually explore their data. Powered by React and Elasticsearch, it provides an intuitive UI for data scientists to take advantage of Elasticsearch's powerful functionality.
You may have heard the news that we’re sharing more information about Stitch Fix. We’ve also been sharing our expertise. We’ve been busy ourselves talking about how we build systems here at Stitch Fix. Here are some talks our team has delivered in the last 2-3 weeks.
This is the first installment in the “Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture” series of posts, and we’ll start off with a widely-applicable pattern called Asynchronous Transaction. It’s a simple pattern to use when your service must perform long-running tasks before giving a definitive result to its consumer.
