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It's kinda surprising how frequently rewrites occur across tech companies; considering rewrites can essentially stop the development of any new features in the
by romanovtexas 9y ago
It's kinda surprising how frequently rewrites occur across tech companies; considering rewrites can essentially stop the development of any new features in the product. I was recently part of one such huge rewrite, albeit it was truly necessary since we were porting from a 1970s COBOL based Mainframe to a Java based Middleware solution. This rewrite itself caused blocked any other development projects for the last 6 months and sucked in a lot of resources.
Isn't sticking to a stable tech stack that helps run production smoothly and let the developers have their peace of mind better? Rewrites might be essential, but only in the cases where your technology is seriously ancient.
Is this only due to the crazy front-end and JS frameworks world or am I missing something else here?
- sethammons 9y agoI can't speak for every case. At my work, we've done some rewrites. On the back end, we've seen 20-100x improvements in performance and the code is easier to maintain after switching many projects from Perl to Go. On the front end, we had to switch because the framework was no longer getting security updates (simple js and html from a symfony back end to an API driven SPA). I can't talk to the benefits of the front end rewrite aside from allowing us to dog food our APIs and allowing the front end teams to use tooling of their choice.