May 2013
8 posts
6 tags
Monitoring network traffic and service chatter...
We recently published a case study with Boundary regarding how we, at Gilt Groupe, are using their product and I wanted to give some additional details concerning our decision process, what we were looking for, what we looked at and why we decided that going to Boundary was the best choice for us moving forward.
Gilt Groupe’s architecture is now very much a case of micro-service architecture. We...
2 tags
Mobile Web How To: Development Environment Toolkit
While working on Gilt Mobile Web, these are our development tools of choice to get the job done:
Browsers & Emulators
Android emulator: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
XCode iOS Simulator: https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
Chrome Canary + mobile settings: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/canary.html
Page Speeds
HTTP proxy/monitor and...
4 tags
Mobile Web How To: Proxy Local Environment To...
When you develop a front end experience for the full screen, the feedback loop between code and test is relatively fast. You code. You refresh your browser. Repeat. When you develop a front end experience for mobile devices, this can become a little cumbersome because the feedback loop can sometimes feel much slower. There are emulators for your machine and browser sizing/user-agent strategies...
3 tags
Mobile Web How-To: Detect Samsung S4 Device On...
This hasn’t been very well documented on the internet just yet so I thought I’d share how you need to connect your Samsung S4 device to a Mac. When you connect this device to your Mac, it (most likely at the time of this writing) will not be recognized.
To have your Mac detect your Samsung S4, you have to do some magic on your device. Click on into SETTINGS and then click on ABOUT...
4 tags
Mobile Web How-To: Inspect Elements On Android's...
I’m building Gilt’s new Android app and a good portion of the website is an Android WebView. As you may or may not know, this WebView uses the default Android Internet Browser to render webpages. You probably know this app best by its logo in the lower right hand corner of this screenshot:
When you use Google Chrome on the Android device, inspection is very straightforward —...
Offsite
A few of us took some time to get to know each other a little better, hug trees and talk shop.
April 2013
6 posts
Ade Trenaman: Why Java 8 doesn't rock my Scala →
ade-trenaman:
I was looking through an article on Java 8, . We’re using Scala heavily at Gilt and I was toying with the heretical notion that Java 8 might create a compelling reason to go back to Java. Sacrilige! I am of course biased in this matter as I’ve really enjoyed the last two years of Scala coding at…
4 tags
Gilt Mobile Web Nav Redesigned
Hello!
Yesterday (April 23, 2013), I sent to production the third phase of the Gilt Mobile Web (m.gilt.com) redesign. In this phase, I updated the primary and secondary nav on the mobile web so that there is (hopefully!) a much better user experience. And like the first and second phase of the redesign, the goal with the m.gilt.com nav redesign was to incorporate learnings taken from the Gilt...
4 tags
Working with Time Series Data
Life in Gilt Tech involves much lively discussion on KPIs, consequently we spend a lot of time looking at time series data.
We use a variety of tools to manipulate and present this type of data, including R, a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.
To help us through the process of standardizing the way we represent our KPIs we have developed a simple, R based...
5 tags
Gilt Mobile Web Redesigned - 10 Views Compared
Over the last three months, we overhauled the front end (jsp, html, handlebars, less/css, javascript, zepto) for Gilt’s mobile web experience (http://m.gilt.com). The redesign was inspired by learnings acquired from our iPhone App and the design is meant to replicate a lot of those features.
Here are 10 side by side comparisons with notes inline and at the bottom. Let us know what you...
March 2013
4 posts
26/3/13: Today's Noon Outage - and what we're...
At Gilt we try to move as fast as we can getting code - be it fixes or awesome new features - to production as quickly and safely as possible. Sometimes we make mistakes, and, today was such a day. Around noon, a commit on one of our flagship applications ran riot: allocating native threads; consuming memory and CPU; and bringing down all other applications collocated on the same set of servers....
4 tags
Intro to AngularJS + Gilt API →
Brett Coffin explains how to build a super slick web application that shows off what you can do with the Gilt API.
3 tags
SXSW 2013 Recap →
The Gilt UX team was at the SXSW Interactive conference this year, and we live blogged all of the sessions we went to. Click in to see our notes on Google’s innovation group and their Glass demo, the future of Foursquare and location, the emergence of tech in fashion, and more!
Scaling Agile at Gilt
With teams, ingredients, initiatives and KPIs
Spotify recently documented their progressive approach to scaling Agile development with a fairly large team. Gilt’s approach has many similarities, but since some Spotify best practices are Gilt anti-patterns, it’s worth a closer look. The Gilt tech team is about 100 strong. Most of our development is done in Manhattan. We’ve...
February 2013
10 posts
Gilt at the Fashion Hackathon
Hello there!
I’m Miguel Fajardo, an engineer at Gilt. I want to share a great experience I had with fellow Gilt engineers Jose Sanchez and Patrick Losco at the recent Fashion Hack during New York Fashion Week.
Hearst Corporation hosted the event in their New York City headquarters, the Hearst Tower. The building is easily identified by its diamond-patterned façade. Many other companies...
2 tags
Gilt Tech @ MongoDB Austin 2013
Last week, Gilt Tech presented ‘MongoDB at Gilt’ at MongoDB Austin. Thank you 10Gen for hosting the event.
4 tags
Codecademy ♥ Gilt
It’s with great pleasure that we’re announcing the awesome Gilt API lessons on Codecademy!
Be ready to take your Javascript skills to the next level and learn how to find the latest and most beautiful fashion products with the Gilt API.
Begin to learn our APIs now!
Some of us went to the NYC Data Science meet up last night to hear Hilary Mason talk about Data Science. Great turnout just to discuss Data!
January 2013
4 posts
Adding LXC support to Cloudstack
At Gilt, our architecture is composed of what we call LOSA - Lots of Small Applications. These apps currently run on bare metal with a couple dozen application instances per machine. As we move towards a fully automated deployment system, we are looking to replace bare metal with virtualization where each VM has a single application instance. We’ve found that Linux containers best meets our...
4 tags
Join Gilt Groupe for the Hearst Fashion Hack on...
Join Gilt Groupe for the Hearst Fashion Hack, the largest fashion hackathon of the year, where you could win $10,000+ to launch your fashion app!
The Hearst Fashion Hack (#HearstFashionHack) kicks off on Saturday, February 9 at 9:00 a.m. with welcoming introductions by Hearst followed by developers pitching their ideas and forming teams. Coding begins promptly at 1:00 p.m. and submissions are...
Father of TM1 @ Gilt!
Gilt will be hosting the TM1 Experts meetup featuring the Father of TM1 on Monday, January 14th!
TM1 has been an invaluable application in Gilt’s enterprise planning and reporting suite. It’s allowed our Finance and Merch Planning teams to collaboratively plan budgets and manage forecasts while dynamically affecting company-wide reporting/analysis. We’re looking forward to...
December 2012
5 posts
Tamara Gruzbarg of Gilt: Using Analytics to Give...
They say that knowledge is power. Nothing could be truer when it comes to the world of business. Customer analytics insights can pack a powerful punch when it comes to your marketing efforts by creating a personal connection. If you know what your customers want, you can give it to them. If you give your customers what they want, they feel a personal connection with you. And that personal...
A Moment of Silence for the Sandy Hook Victims
Please join us in observing a minute of silence in honor of the Sandy Hook victims on Dec. 21 at 9:30am EST. Gilt will go dark at this time.
November 2012
5 posts
How gilt.com/give came to be
When Sandy hit New York, many of us were directly impacted in some way. After the first week, power had been restored in our main office and in most of our homes. Our focus started to shift from covering basic needs to finding a way to help the New York region rebuild. Eventually we decided to build gilt.com/give - with a focus on driving donations to the affected region and foot traffic to...
Teaching Scala @ TCD ... back to the roots
20 years ago I used to teach object-oriented programming (based on Eiffel) at my old university in Germany.
This week I got the chance to experience a deja-vu, because earlier this year I did run into Glenn Strong who is teaching Functional Programming in TCD in Dublin and we started to develop the idea that it would be useful to add a Scala module to his Haskell based lecture.
The main idea was...
Sometimes small things make a big difference ......
<outing alarm>I love my emacs.</outing alarm>
Sometimes small things can make a big difference. Like a dot. You can put it at the end of the sentence or in a number (1.001 vs. 100.1 - can make a “small” difference) or you put it into the zero to make it easily distinguishable from capital O.
Now you might say, who cares, but if you read a lot of source code (like I do)...
Data Team goes to Partners
Four of us on the Data Engineering team spent the week before Super Storm Sandy at the Teradata Partners conference. Its essentially a massive week long Teradata sponsored meetup hosting >250 Data Warehouse/Analytics presentations.
Both Chris and Deep presented for the first time. (see pictures below!)
Chris spoke about his pricing work using R linear mixed effect regression and random...
October 2012
1 post
MongoDB performance at Gilt
Over the past several months several high traffic services have gone live at Gilt using MongoDB as a back end. MongoDB collections are a really good fit for many of our use cases. What we’ve found is that when MongoDB is happy it runs fast and reliably; but there are a few things that can catch you out.
Throttle your writes/updates MongoDB uses a global write lock. Only one process can...
August 2012
1 post
July 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Search on Gilt
Some of our users may have noticed a new and welcome addition to Gilt over the last few weeks - we’ve rolled out search across our Women’s, Men’s, Kids and Home stores! In Gilt Tech we know how much our members love the thrill of the hunt when our sales go live every day; and, as a tech team, we’ve always felt good about building our site to drive a great flash-sale shopping...
Gilt Internal Hackathon - July edition
On July 12th the Gilt Tech team kicked off a two-day internal hackathon with four goals:
1. Hack with people that you don’t usually work with. 2. Hack with people that you don’t usually work with. 3. Hack with people that you don’t usually work with. 4. Focus on building internal tools and cleaning up code.
The Event
Day one started with Yoni keynoting event with a brief...
Gilt Live: A New Way to Shop
Gilt Live is a new way to shop on Gilt. It gives you the chance to see what our members are buying on Gilt - right now. We are excited because it gives you a way to discover new products that you might never have seen. And since it is updating in real-time you can see something sell out right before your eyes –- or not if you are quick enough to jump on it.
The Technology
Gilt Live is Gilt’s...
June 2012
2 posts
3 tags
6 tags
