Dublin software engineers behind Gilt Home site revamp

6 Jun 2012

The Gilt Home site, revamped by Dublin-based software engineers

It’s been just more than a year since the lifestyle e-commerce player Gilt announced it was setting up an international HQ and software development centre in Dublin. Now the new team of software engineers based in Dublin are behind the redevelopment of the Gilt Home website.

Back in April 2011, the New York-headquartered Gilt Groupe announced it was bringing 200 jobs to Ireland with the setting up of the international HQ in the country, as well as the software development centre in Dublin and a customer support centre in Limerick.

Gilt.com was founded in 2007 and works with more than 1,200 brands to offer more than 3.5m members daily discounts on everything from designer labels to home décor.

The redevelopment of Gilt Home was the first major engineering project undertaking for the new Dublin engineering team. The members-only site offers daily deals on more than 400 luxury furnishings and home décor brands at up to 60pc off retail prices.

Adrian Trenaman was the technical lead for the project. He said that when the team first began working on the redesign of the site, the biggest engineering challenge was about how to deliver a high-quality, personalised experience.

Technical innovation

Because Gilt sales go live at noon (EST time) every day, he said members tend to flock to the site at this time, so the site revamp required a lot of technical innovation.

“From an architectural perspective, when we began building the new site our focus was on building Gilt Home as a rich, front-end experience backed by a cluster of lightweight, scalable, stateless services performing the core business logic,” said Trenaman.

He said the team used an in-house Scala framework, with the aim of delivering cleaner code.

“Behind these lightweight, scalable services, we use a mix of traditional relational databases, such as Postgres, alongside more modern no-SQL document-oriented databases like MongoDB and Voldemort in cases where we can trade eventual consistency for performance,” added Trenaman.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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