Zappos Engineering

A Lean Approach to Creating an API

Last year I picked up a project that needed some extra functionality. The project was to take a small portion of our product data, manually add some partner specific data, then make it available to the partner as a restful API interface. The partner relationship was…

Zappos Magic Checkout Project

We love to do interesting things here at Zappos, and we certainly love finding new ways to WOW our…

Getter/Setter — the most hated practice in Java.

You should use getter/setter.
You should use getter/setter.
You should use getter/setter.
If you don’t, you are not a good programmer. Really?

Stop Break’ing Your Code

To break or not to break? Is that the question?

TL;DR

Stop using break statements in your loops, opt instead for “termination” variables. These are variables that should be a part of the termination condition of a loop making it…

The Clustering Process

In my experience as a Data Scientist in an e-commerce company, when asked a question, clustering is very often the answer. The problem with clustering being the answer is that it raises a 100 other questions.

Coding Club: Fractals

Every two weeks a group of software engineers here at Zappos meet over pizza and wings and brush up on computer science topics that tend to get rusty. In the words of our internal wiki explaining Coding Club:

much of computer science practice is learned in school…

Tracking capacity usage using a cache

Recently, I had to find a way to download close to 30 000 000 rows of data from AWS DynamoDB locally so I could run some analysis on the data. The downloading by itself is relatively easy using the scan operation. But there is a cost to using that operation. And…