I'm in Atlanta and have had a few discussions with people at Chik-fil-A (CFA) about joining on of their teams. I have a good friend that just moved from Intel to CFA working on business analytics. It seems like a really great place to work. And yes, whenever I mention to someone that I might be working on machine learning problems at CFA I always get a puzzled look in return. :)

Their food court is amazing. You can have steamed salmon and a Spicy Chicken sandwich at the same time. Also free to your family.

> machine learning problems at CFA

This is prime deep fried learning pun territory...

Alex Smola already nailed this in 2015 with deep-fried convnets, which replaces fully connected layers with fft-accelerated algorithms.

CFA has long meant control flow analysis in PL.

I worked for Nordstrom for several years and whenever I describe their technology department to another developer they're always pretty shocked. It was pretty shocking to me when I started there too.

I'm curious about Nordstrom, I know nothing of their infrastructure.

I was surprised too, when I saw their name in the Devops Handbook; apparently they were one of the pioneers of Devops. Talking with a previous employee, it sounds like they really reinvented themselves from an IT department to a little tech oasis within the company.

You can find some pretty awesome work on "traditional" companies. There are some pretty cutting-edge projects where I work too :) (but way more legacy migrations and boring financial CRUD apps).

I think one thing that doesn't always occur to programmers who haven't experienced is that really boring problems can be really interesting to work on.

(And really interesting problems can be really boring to work on, and really interesting companies can have a lot of cruft and technical debt under the hood.)

Their tech stack is similar to what you'd expect from any large tech company. I can't speak much to the server side of things (I worked on the iOS app) but I know they had everything ranging from older monolithic .NET apps to Node and Go micro services.

Their GitHub page (https://github.com/Nordstrom) doesn't have much in the way of internal projects, but it has lots of forks that will give you an idea of some of the tools they used.

Nordstrom also does polymorphic React with server-side rendering via .NET [0]. I've always been impressed with this part of their stack.

[0] https://libraries.io/github/Nordstrom/React.NET

Latest commit e56c9be on 24 Apr 2015 - wonder if it's still in use internally?

Actually they're a bit of a pioneer in Serverless computing:

https://serverless.com/blog/rob-gruhl-serverless-event-sourc...

We did a case study on Nordstrom recently in the CNCF, check it out: https://www.cncf.io/case-study-nordstrom/

Here's a recent talk from KubeCon/CloudNativeCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=xZO9nx6GBu0

To add to the curiosity, how is Nordstrom doing anyway, compared to other mall-type retail? I'm wondering if this forward-thinking in tech is allowing them to successfully fight "new" ecommerce such as Amazon

As far as retail companies go, they’re doing well. Stock isn’t doing great, but as far as I know they’re still quite profitable.

Being forward thinking in tech has helped them a lot with regards to being able to move pretty fast on new things. At the same time, a website as old as theirs has a LOT of legacy.

Nordstrom is doing pretty well for their online stores. I have to order things there for family every so often

What's interesting to think about is how, in the lead up to the dotcom bubble/bust, I would think execs at tons of traditional retail/brick and mortar/consumer brands would have probably been like shit shit and then put more IT-focused organizational architecture components in place, which probably lead to many interesting technical solutions to many of the problems they faced (if they did it the right way). It would be cool to see different branching that lead to different technical solutions for common problems.

Unfortunately, as this was before the OSS boom that came later, we probably will never see these solutions out in the open.

Recently at work someone used JS tooling from their Github org and I was like what!? Found a lot of good stuff there.

Seeing down thread they were big DevOps adopters changes my mind of how I saw them as stodgy. Too bad I dislike pretty much all they sell!

Ha, y'all were an AWS/clickstream example at the Nashville Analytics Summit yesterday, granted it wasn't a new deck so maybe you've heard that before.

Which session was that? The Kinesis/Lambda one?

The 4 hour workshop/hello world for AWS, it was in the intro deck on why you should be doing analysis and what not. Probably preaching to the choir for most of the room.

It's almost like being down the street from 2+ major technology companies might have rubbed off on them...

Word of mouth tells me they are underpaying people for Seattle-area CoL

Most retailers don't have the challenges of scale that we have and I think thats why its weird to see tech innovation in a restaurant. That said, we need it to scale and are grateful to the k8s community for making what we are working to do possible!