May 2012
3 posts
7 tags
NYC Fashion Hack Day 2012: June 16
What’s the NYC Fashion Hack Day? On Saturday, June 16, 2012, Gilt Tech is joining forces with two giants of their respective industries: Apigee, in the business of APIs and cloud platforms, and Tumblr, in the business of hosting and spreading the word about art and creativity and blogs about dogs on top of things. Together, we’re excited to host a 12-hour hackathon event at Gilt HQ...
1 tag
Gilt is hosting the Play! NYC meetup →
This Monday (May 21) Gilt will host the Play! NYC group in our shiny new office space.
A few of us at Gilt have really taken a liking to the Play! web framework, but we wanted to be able to connect with other engineers so we could share experiences and learn about this exciting new framework. We started this group to fill a void we saw in NYC.
The first meetup of the group will be an...
7 tags
Friday Fun with Gilt Games
The Gilt Public API is a great tool for developing new ways for people to shop quickly, efficiently, or on new platforms. But developers using the API are also finding unexpected things to do with Gilt data— they’re using it to make games.
So in the spirit of Friday, why not spend a few minutes playing with a couple of games that have been built on top of the Public API?
Gilt Memory...
April 2012
3 posts
The 5th Floor
Gilt Tech have been enjoying their new space on the 5th floor of 2 Park Avenue, NYC.
8 tags
Gilt Tech @ NYC Powered By MongoDB Hackathon
What’s better than spending 24 hours in Manhattan hacking on sweet projects using MongoDB and the Gilt API? Doing it while supporting HackNY, a New York City organization that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship among the city’s up-and-coming students and hackers. And that’s exactly what you can do next weekend, April 27-28, at 10gen’s MongoDB Hackathon. A lot of...
3 tags
The PMO: Right Work, Right Time, Right People
You might be surprised to learn that Gilt Tech has a Program Management Organization (aka “The PMO”). Why do I think you might be surprised? Well, the role of project management in traditional organizations has typically been one associated with paperwork and process (We need to talk about your TPS reports…). It has also been associated with hindering rapid development and...
March 2012
3 posts
5 tags
Lessons in Ratatouille
I have a son who is obsessed with Pixar movies, so I have seen “Ratatouille” about 100 times. It wasn’t until recently however, that I started to draw parallels between the movie’s lessons and lessons in organizational culture. Lesson One: “Anyone Can Cook” The core vision statement of Gusteau, the original chef who built his restaurant into an empire and what...
3 tags
SummerQAmp: introducing QA as a career opportunity
The tech team at Gilt is excited to launch SummerQAmp (summer-kamp) with Bon Jovi, the White House, GroupMe and Onswipe. This is a great initiative that is launching as a part of the White House’s Summer Jobs+ program to introduce Quality Assurance as a career path to youth in the U.S.
QA @ Gilt
Our Quality Assurance team is made up of individuals that are programmers with Computer...
7 tags
Public API Language Bindings, Round 2
There’s been even more work done getting the Gilt API wrapped up in language bindings over the past two weeks and I’m here to present the newest to you in case any of them tickle your fancy.
gilt_api_php is a PHP client written by Gilt Tech member Dan Revel. This library has tests and a demo app to get you started on downloading and featuring sales and products in no time.
...
February 2012
6 posts
7 tags
Affiliate Marketing Program Open to Developers
It’s been great to hear from developers over the past two weeks about their plans for the Gilt Public API, and we can only imagine what’s in the works out there that we haven’t heard about yet! Meanwhile, back at Gilt HQ, we’re hard at work on adding more to the API— more data and more ways of accessing what you want in the easiest way possible.
In the meantime, though,...
12 tags
First Public API Language Bindings Available Now!
7 days ago, we launched our Public API and the accompanying Developer Portal. We’ve received a lot of great feedback, updated the Portal a bit to better give you the information you need, and talked to a lot of developers with some really neat ideas for ways to use the API. Now’s a great time to get started on your own application!
Today I’m here to share some of the hard work...
Managers! Become the Flywheel.
Arguably, the job of an engineering manager is to hire and sculpt a development team that is not only highly productive, but also precisely resourced for immediate business priorities.
Easier said than done. Businesses are highly erratic organisms. Especially start-ups. From week to week our business environment changes and company priorities evolve accordingly. In response to this, so does the...
NoSQL in the Real World - The Video, Pics and...
Thanks to everyone who came to Gilt Tech’s latest tech talk, NoSQL in the Real World.
We had a great series of speakers including:
Ara Anjargolian - Redis
Matt Parker - CouchDB
Sean Cribbs - Riak
Edward Capriolo - Cassandra
Luke Gotszling - MongoDB
Huge thanks to Rockman and Maureen for organizing the event, and to AOL ventures for sponsoring and hosting.
Enjoy out the video...
1 tag
Gilt Public API Launched
I’m really excited to tell you that we’ve launched our Public API today, providing programmatic access to a constantly-updating collection of flash sales full of the usual kind of awesome stuff we offer on Gilt’s stores.
We held an internal hackathon two weeks ago and saw some really interesting projects come out of just a day’s work and the brainpower of one room of...
Old Browsers in eCommerce: What to do with IE6?
In a humanitarian effort to improve developer quality of life, we at Gilt recently stopped supporting Internet Explorer 6. This means we no longer use, develop or test for the browser. Given the small and shrinking population of IE6 users and the auto-upgrades planned for this year, we felt that it is worth our developers’ happiness (and sanity) to abandon support efforts. Our FEET (Front...
January 2012
3 posts
NoSQL in the Real World
For the last couple of years the interwebs have been abuzz with discussion on the relative merits of NoSQL database technology, but how has it performed in real world deployments?
Please join us for the second of the Gilt technical meetups to hear prominent local technology companies present on their experiences using Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB and Riak in production environments.
The...
1 tag
December 2011
2 posts
My Time at Gilt
I arrived at 2 Park Ave on the first day of my internship not quite sure what I was getting myself into. I had just finished my sophomore year at Dartmouth and was looking forward to my first time living in New York City. My sophomore year was packed with computer science. I had taken the notorious software design and algorithm design courses, I was doing research with the chair of the...
Gilt APIs
Over the next few months, Gilt will be exposing its data model via a new suite of public APIs. We’re excited to make our data available to a broader audience of hackers, and we can’t wait to see what people do with it.
Our first API is a set of Atom Pub feeds, which let you see our active and upcoming sales, either en masse, or store by store.
For example,...
November 2011
1 post
1 tag
October 2011
5 posts
Gilt Home Launch
Exotic Languages and the Web
Thanks to everyone that braved the rain and showed up for Gilt’s Exotic Programming Languages and the Web Tech Talk this Wednesday. We had a great turnout and some awesome speakers.
The talks
Scala: Nathan Hamblen, organizer of ny-scala meetups
Clojure: David Nolen, lead Developer for Shiftspace
Jean Barmash: organizer of the Groovy / Grails Meetups
Andrew Pliszka:...
Building Great Tech Teams: 12 Critical Questions
I recently had the pleasure of talking at First Capital’s CTO summit. I hosted an interactive discussion on team building for around 100 CTOs and VPEs of small to medium sized, venture backed technology companies.
Here’s how the audience voted on 12 critical questions:
#1: Should you hire specialists or generalists? (52 Votes)
#2: Are job-relevant Degrees Necessary? (49 Votes)
#3:...
Exotic Languages and the Web
Gilt Tech are hosting a series of NYC events on technology innovation.
In the first of the series, “Exotic languages and the Web”, we’ll hear lightning talks on real-world uses of Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Erlang and CoffeeScript, followed by drinks and discussion.
We’re hosting this on October the 19th at the Carlton Hotel on Madison Ave.
These events are open to the NY...
Restoring Page State with Session Storage
Managing the back button on the web is hard, especially remembering the previous page’s state when the back button is used. Fragment identifiers can be a solution, and there are some great plugins out there which use that method. However, there’s only one URL fragment, so identifiers need to be carefully namespaced to avoid collisions and the fragment in the URL becomes detritus that...
September 2011
1 post
Implementing Taxonomy for Better User Experiences
by Amy DeCicco, Taxonomist and Steve O’Brien, Sr. Software Engineer
Halston, We Have a Problem Like most rapidly growing start ups, product classification at Gilt Groupe was not fully formed at the outset. Initially, products were tagged with keywords, and those keywords were user-defined and free-form. One person’s “shoes” was another person’s “lace-ups” was another person’s “monkstraps,” and as...
August 2011
4 posts
Thinking Functionally - The Video
If you’re curious about functional programming, I’d recommend watching Dr. Venkat Subramaniam’s recent talk at Gilt HQ. “Thinking Functionally” provides an insightful and entertaining overview of functional programming techniques and assumes no previous experience in this area.
Venkat does the whole presentation in TextMate, working through examples in Java, Scala and Groovy.
My Time in Gilt Tech
I walked into the office one morning to see my boss doing push-ups. Pictures were being taken and videos recorded. As a relatively new intern at the time, I was confused. It turned out he had answered a question with the word “mine,” breaking the only rule of the “Game of Life” at Gilt Tech. That type of thing isn’t too unusual at Gilt – its culture encourages this...
Using Dependency Injection To Incorporate A/B...
If you work at an e-commerce company, chances are you’ve probably come across the term “A/B testing”. We all know that it has something to do with testing out new features on users and seeing which ones are “better”. A/B testing is really the practice of comparing the effect that a feature (“treatment” in statistical terms) has on different groups of...
1 tag
Thinking Functionally
Gilt Tech is proud to host Thinking Functionally, a tech talk by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat will speak at our 2 Park offices on August 18. More here.
Thinking Functionally: Programmers are beginning to rediscover this powerful style of programming. The prominence of multicore processors and the emergence of multiple languages on the JVM is reigniting strong interest in this paradigm. In...
July 2011
1 post
Welcome to the Mothership
In the summer of 2010, our Ops team was tasked with migrating our production systems from one hosting platform to another and immediately began to take stock of the challenges presented by our tools and processes. At Gilt, we make extensive use of both Cobbler and Puppet for our provisioning and configuration management, respectively. Configuration management software like Puppet is...
June 2011
4 posts
Gilt Technologie goes Global
Gilt Technologie is all about leveraging leading-edge technology to build and operate the most reliable and scalable e-commerce platform in the marketplace.
However, recently, the organization took on a whole new challenge - maximize our ability to attract the very best in talent world-wide by building out a truly distributed, global engineering organization. To fulfill that goal, we’re...
1 tag
Product Recommendations at Gilt
Product recommendations at Gilt work a little differently than they do at other companies. For example, at Amazon they enjoy the benefit of having a relatively static and large inventory so they can do things like collaborative filter – where you can recommend a product based on what other people have bought or looked at. Gilt is unique because our inventory is in constant flux. The products we...
1 tag
PCI Poetry
Payment Card Industry A poem by Sam Kassoumeh
PCI, oh PCI, 200 requirements we must comply. From password settings to policies, The time has come to rotate the keys. Above and beyond the norm we go. Protect the cards that is our goal. Standing out in the ecommerce crowd, We take the steps to make our QSA proud. Passphrase A and passphrase B, Will be joined in digital matrimony. ...
May 2011
4 posts
Gilt Tech Talks - Mike Taylor on HTML5 Web...
Yesterday we were lucky enough to have Opera’s Mike Taylor delivering a Gilt technical talk on the HTML5 Web Messaging Specification. Mike illustrates how messaging makes communication within and between web applications possible and discusses message events and the postMessage() and MessageChannel() APIs.
You can see the slides from the talk below.
2 tags
Java -> Scala
Graham Tackley of the Guardian.co.uk was kind enough to deliver the latest in our series of technical talks. Graham discusses the Guardian’s transition from Java to Scala, highlighting both the advantages and difficulties of the migration.
You can see the slides from the talk below.
Optimistic Type-casting in Objective C
As developers, we often find ourselves dealing with some variant of this scenario: we’re iterating through a collection containing mixed object types, and we’re only interested in objects of a certain type.
For example, let’s say we’ve got an NSArray representing desks in a classroom. Each array element corresponds to a specific physical desk, which may or may not be...
1 tag
April 2011
6 posts
Managers, stay out of the way!
Successful managers learn how to stay out of the way and let their teams work effectively and independently. Staying out the way doesn’t mean putting your feet up on your desk and playing Angry Birds on your iPad while your team does all the hard work. It means creating an environment where smart people feel empowered to recognize, own and solve problems. Here are some ideas to help you as a...
3 tags
PuppetNYC Monthly Meetup: 13-Apr-2011
Foreman and Change Management+VCS with Puppet Just so you know, the Systems Administration team here at Gilt is lazy. We are constantly looking for ways to make our jobs easier, and automate everything possible. When it comes to having to say, update a package on every server in our sizable network; we respond with, “That just sounds like a lot of work, I wonder if there is something that can...
5 tags
Gilt Tech Divas
So far, the blog has been focusing on all the amazing work that goes on in Gilt Technologie, but we’d like to take a moment to write about something that makes working at Gilt truly great. The people. Specifically, the women. ;-) Here’s a glimpse into our fabulously diverse tech team by those of us brave enough to step up and say, “Hello world.” (Rock on Gilt Tech Divas!) Janice E. Bouley,...
2 tags
Presentation: Building a JavaScript Module...
Slides and video from Eric Shepherd’s presentation given at Gilt HQ and at the Brooklyn JavaScript Meetup:
Summary
For modules to function within a large-scale system and on third-party sites, they need to be self-contained units with minimal dependencies. They also need to keep their hands off of other modules and library code. Gilt’s module framework manages multiple independent components,...
March 2011
4 posts
Hackathon
CNN stopped by Gilt HQ to cover our first Hackathon of 2011. The 24 hour hacking extravaganza produced more than a dozen ideas. Features included using your iPhone’s camera to find products that coordinate with the color of anything you point it at, to umbrella sales that activate when it starts raining near you.
Read the CNN story and check out some pictures from the event.
2 tags
1 tag
Five Questions You Must Ask Your PCI Auditor...
Cautionary Tale Told By My Friend
The QSA walked into the conference room, sat down and took out a thick beige folder labeled “PCI”. She looked uneasy as she started going down the list of questions from top-to-bottom:
- “Umm okay, requirement 8.1. Identify all users with a unique user name … Do you do that?” she asked.
- “Yes, we do. However in a few cases we have to use generic accounts in our...
The Rule of 4
At Gilt, we’ve stumbled into something we internally call the rule of 4: Q: How many servers should we have for this new app? A: 4 Q: How many partitions should we split our inventory into? A: 4 Q: How many nodes should the cart KV store run on? A: 4 Why 4? One is not a good idea - building for 1 makes it hard to expand later (e.g. imagine building a service that runs on a single node…...