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Patterns of Service-Oriented Architecture

Dave Copeland on

This is the start of a blog series called “Patterns of Service-Oriented Architecture”, which is based on my experience at Stitch Fix (the first post is up if you want to get right to it!). Over the last four years, we’ve gone from a team of two developers and one Rails app, to almost 80 developers managing 40+ applications. These applications are a mixture of user-facing and headless services. While our technical architecture isn’t perfect, we’ve had relatively few major problems. Part of the reason for that is that we’ve done a decent job of identifying and re-applying patterns to solve similar technical challenges.

The Making of the Tour, Part 3: Micro-Animations

Brian Coffey and Tarek Rached on

In this last installment of our Making of the Tour series, we look at some of the fun and random.

The Making of the Tour, Part 2: Simulations

Brian Coffey and Tarek Rached on

In this post, we'll talk about some simulation-powered animations, provide some cleaned up code that you can use, and discuss these animations' genesis and utility for visualizing abstract systems and algorithms or for visualizing real historical data and projected futures.

The Making of the Tour, Part 1: Process and Structure

Brian Coffey, Tarek Rached, and Eric Colson on

Earlier this month, we released an interactive animation describing how data science is woven into the fabric of Stitch Fix: our Algorithms Tour. It was a lot of fun to make and even more fun to see people’s responses to it. For those interested in how we did it, we thought we’d give a quick tour of what lies under that Tour.

Ruminations on Data-Driven Fashion Design

Daragh Sibley and Erin Boyle on

Last summer, we wrote about Stitch Fix’s early experiments in data-driven fashion design. Since then, we’ve been studying, developing, and testing new ways to create clothes that delight our clients. Some of this work was featured yesterday in an article in The Wall Street Journal. As a companion to that piece, we wanted to highlight a few avenues that we have explored recently.

Tech Radar Spring 2017 Update

Dave Copeland on

We’ve been trying to use the technology radar concept as a way to document both what technologies we have in use as well as our current thinking on direction. It’s viewed as documentation and not speculation, so our tech radar should never have stuff in it that’s not actually in production.

A Tour of our Algorithms Allegories

Eric Colson on

How data science is woven into the fabric of Stitch Fix. In this interactive tour we share ten “stories” of how data science is is integral to our operations and product.

The intimate relationship between exoplanets and fashion trends

Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda on

At first sight the difference between planets outside our solar system (exoplanets from now on) and fashion trends seems enormous, but all of us math lovers know that entirely different phenomena can have an almost identical mathematical description. In this very peculiar case, exoplanetary systems and certain fashion trends can be characterized as having a periodic nature, with certain magnitudes repeating cyclically, and this will allow us to use very similar techniques to study them.

What's Wrong With My Time Series

Alex Smolyanskaya on

Time series modeling sits at the core of critical business operations such as supply and demand forecasting and quick-response algorithms like fraud and anomaly detection. Small errors can be costly, so it’s important to know what to expect of different error sources. In this post I’ll go through alternative strategies for understanding the sources and magnitude of error in time series.

Scaling Data Science:
Slides from #DDTX17

Stefan Krawczyk on

For those who attended my talk at Data Day Texas in Austin last weekend, you heard me talk about how Stitch Fix has reduced contention on: Access to data & Access to ad-hoc compute resources; to help scale Data Science. As attendees requested, I have posted my slides here, which you can find a link to...