By Antão Almada A mirror where people can see themselves wearing virtual clothing has always been considered magical or something from sci-fi movies. Given the quick advances in technology, expectations are very high. People expect it to be fully established by now. There are already many examples of “virtual try-on”…

By Pedro Azevedo This is the second part of the series about iFetch, multimodal conversational agents for the online fashion marketplace. If you haven’t started reading this series, check the first article before going further. In the near future, AI agents will mediate the majority of interactions between large organisations…

By Felipe Lino FARFETCH works with top technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB among others. And this article is about KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) and how we find a good way to use it to scale a stream processor application. Motivation KEDA with the Prometheus Scaler available on FARFETCH opens…

A case study of co-organization in the VISUM Summer School By Ricardo Sousa INTRODUCTION In 2021 and 2022, our team partnered with the VISion Understanding and Machine intelligence (VISUM) summer school to organize a project, define a small contest, and provide mentoring, respectively. …

By Inês Machado In an era where mental health is increasingly claiming space in our daily lives, it is essential to bring this concern to our workplace as well. If vigorous mental health brings more productivity to the performance of a professional activity, a Cognitive Load adjusted to the capacity…

By Pedro Cerqueira I was a water polo player before I was a product manager. I played water polo for 20 years and learned many important lessons. …

By Manuel Meireles The Problem As a developer working on end-user apps that consume platform services through public APIs, it can be very frustrating to develop and test my features due to the environments. The bigger and more complex the platform side becomes, the harder it is to have a stable and…

By Filipe Esch and Guilherme Ferreira FARFETCH relies on an event-driven architecture to handle more than 150k messages per second, only in one region. Leveraging Apache Kafka, this architecture serves as the backbone of the operations. But autonomy comes at a price in a distributed system like this. Having many…

By Joaquim Baptista How do you explain a large complex system that is under constant rework to pursue an evolving business reality? Founded in 2007 by José Neves for the love of fashion, and launched in 2008, FARFETCH began as an e-commerce marketplace for luxury boutiques worldwide. …