Stitch Fix Algorithms at SXSW

In March of 2016, SXSW will be hosting the Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The festival is focussed on the mindshare of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity where people get a glimmer of what the future has to offer. Eric Colson and Eli Bressert are both planning to be there and talk about changing industries with data analytics and how machines take on art. The talks are being considered by the judges until September 4th where public voting will account for 30% of their considearation.

Best Technology Work Culture

Facebook, Uber, Lyft, GitHub, Pandora - an impressive list of companies. And now Stitch Fix, a company devoted to disrupting the retail industry with innovative technology, and where I work as a software engineer, was in direct competition against these organizations.

Data Exploration with Weight of Evidence and Information Value in R

Binary classification models are perhaps the most common use-case in predictive analytics. The reason is that many key client actions across a wide range of industries are binary in nature, such as defaulting on a loan, clicking on an ad, or terminating a subscription.

GAM: The Predictive Modeling Silver Bullet

Imagine that you step into a room of data scientists; the dress code is casual and the scent of strong coffee is hanging in the air. You ask the data scientists if they regularly use generalized additive models (GAM) to do their work. Very few will say yes, if any at all.

Pyxley: Python Powered Dashboards

Learning from the experience of others with mixed effects models

At Stitch Fix we have many problems that boil down to finding the best match between items in two sets. Our recommendation algorithms match inventory to clients with the help of the expert human judgment of our stylists. We also match these stylists to clients. This blog post is about the remarkably useful application of some classical statistical models to these and similar problems that feature repeated measurements.

Personalizing Beyond the Point of No Return

There is an old story of a commander who, upon landing on the beach of his adversary, ordered “burn the boats” so that his warriors would have no other choice but to triumph. The imposed constraint provided clarity. The lack of a fallback mechanism and the high cost of failure focused all efforts towards victory.

The Most Colorful State

Throughout the year, people wear different types of clothes. As we transition from Summer to Fall, tanktops are replaced by sweaters, and as Spring turns into Summer, pants are replaced by shorts and skirts. But what about colors? Do people wear different colors to match the seasons? From anecdotal experience we would say yes. One might even guess that people tend to wear more gray/black clothing in New York vs. sunny Los Angeles during the Winter.

Anatomy of a Rails Service Object

We’ve given up on “fat models, skinny controllers” as a design style for our Rails apps—in fact we abandoned it before we started. Instead, we factor our code into special-purpose classes, commonly called service objects. We’ve thrashed on exactly how these classes should be written, so this post is going to outline what I think is the most successful way to create a service object.

Go for interesting work, not 'interesting' jobs

A couple of years ago a developer friend and I were discussing our ideal engineering jobs. I didn’t have a specific idea of what mine would be but I knew that it would sound boring to most people. Less than a year later I found myself at Stitch Fix doing just that and I could not be happier.