Yes. I think this Etsy story showcases an interesting split in engineering approach, between being "right" vs being "effective". Perhaps a variant on "worse is

Yes. I think this Etsy story showcases an interesting split in engineering approach, between being "right" vs being "effective". Perhaps a variant on "worse is better". Etsy was originally built by two NYU students while they were still in college. It was their first production software project. It grew super fast in a period where the whole industry was still figuring out how to scale web applications; perhaps only Amazon & eBay had actually figured it out by then. Then VCs got ahold of Etsy and tried to put out the fires by replacing the "kids" who built the thing. This was around 2006, which predates even Twitter's fail whale and Series A funding to round. The founding team wasn't a bad engineering team. It was a young founding team who built a thing that grew like crazy, and which, had it not been built that way, would have meant no engineer could have ever come along to preside over a rewrite. But because it was crashing and dollars were at stake, and because there was some drama that prevented the founding team from having the time to build a proper scale-up engineering organization, a bunch of people came in and immediately reached for a rewrite. They had a working thing, on a not-that-uncommon stack, but the new engineers insisted on a rewrite. Why? Because new engineers always insist on a rewrite. Because, as my friend James Powell once put it, "Good code is code I wrote; bad code is code you wrote." Python and Twisted. I am a big fan of Python and watched the evolution of Twisted -- the rise in popularity, and then the decline. I can imagine how they came across a group of engineers who were absolutely convinced Twisted was the silver bullet to solve their engineering challenges, at that specific moment in time -- when Twisted was at a peak of popularity. Just like Django/Rails was the silver bullet in 2011. (Or Scala?) Just like Angular was in 2015 (or Go?). Just like React is now (Or k8s?). Of course, I am not using the "silver bullet" term accidentally. Tech trends change, but "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." (Brooks, 1976) New tools are just an excuse for a rewrite, and rewrites are the ultimate shiny object to a new engineering team, brought in to "fix" an existing and working system. As an aside: the founding software team at Etsy didn't get nearly enough credit for building a thing that worked and that grew from nothing. If they had focused on the "right" architecture, none of us would have ever have heard of Etsy, and we certainly wouldn't be debating the rewrite. That founding team didn't get enough credit, neither in equity nor in history. But that's another story.