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As an ex-Xero employee, I just had to blink twice seeing this trending on Hacker News. For context, Xero is primarily huge in New Zealand and Australia with a l

As an ex-Xero employee, I just had to blink twice seeing this trending on Hacker News. For context, Xero is primarily huge in New Zealand and Australia with a large UK chunk but not much presence in the US. While I shouldn't say too much, I'm sure the incident history speaks for itself that this isn't unheard of :) https://status.xero.com/history https://status.xero.com/history Arguably underreported I might think considering the userbase however

spondyl 5y ago
Admittedly, this incident is probably a pretty big one since it was acknowledged on their Twitter account. They'll mention it in response to customers but you only see an actual broadcast to followers when something is really on fire. I hope the responders at least get a bit of sleep (it's currently 11pm here in NZ and the HQ is in Wellington, New Zealand)
_kyran 5y ago
Can you shed any light on what the codebase is like? Using it feels like there are two seperate templating libraries and apps that are serving different routes. Is there any truth to this?
- spondyl 5y ago
  Ahh dang, I wrote a whole post and then I accidentally closed the tab :) As background, Xero is in the same boat as a whole host of different businesses. It's nothing unique to them at all. They started with a single C# monolith and that scaled until it started running into trouble. At this point, you start splitting out your monolith into different services and Xero is quite a ways down that track. At present, there's still a decent chunk of code that still lives in the original monolithic codebase. The initial home screen (dashboards etc) live in there among other things as an example. When you navigate between services however (ie; invoicing or payroll), those are actually entirely different sites run by other teams that you're switching between, even though the UI is the same (the navigation bar is itself a separate service too for example which is why sometimes you get incidents where the nav bar disappears, if that service runs into trouble) There is an in-house CSS library that is standard to keep everything consistent but there may still be older versions of it between services or even different JS libraries depending on how old or new a given service is. So I guess to answer your question, the answer is yes, there are multiple templating libraries and things like that under the hood. Beyond that, I probably shouldn't go into too much detail! Most of the above I think you can infer just by navigating around the application and seeing how various cookies, stylesheets and what not change so there's nothing particular unique.

spondyl 5y ago

Admittedly, this incident is probably a pretty big one since it was acknowledged on their Twitter account. They'll mention it in response to customers but you only see an actual broadcast to followers when something is really on fire. I hope the responders at least get a bit of sleep (it's currently 11pm here in NZ and the HQ is in Wellington, New Zealand)

_kyran 5y ago

Can you shed any light on what the codebase is like? Using it feels like there are two seperate templating libraries and apps that are serving different routes. Is there any truth to this?

spondyl 5y ago
Ahh dang, I wrote a whole post and then I accidentally closed the tab :) As background, Xero is in the same boat as a whole host of different businesses. It's nothing unique to them at all. They started with a single C# monolith and that scaled until it started running into trouble. At this point, you start splitting out your monolith into different services and Xero is quite a ways down that track. At present, there's still a decent chunk of code that still lives in the original monolithic codebase. The initial home screen (dashboards etc) live in there among other things as an example. When you navigate between services however (ie; invoicing or payroll), those are actually entirely different sites run by other teams that you're switching between, even though the UI is the same (the navigation bar is itself a separate service too for example which is why sometimes you get incidents where the nav bar disappears, if that service runs into trouble) There is an in-house CSS library that is standard to keep everything consistent but there may still be older versions of it between services or even different JS libraries depending on how old or new a given service is. So I guess to answer your question, the answer is yes, there are multiple templating libraries and things like that under the hood. Beyond that, I probably shouldn't go into too much detail! Most of the above I think you can infer just by navigating around the application and seeing how various cookies, stylesheets and what not change so there's nothing particular unique.