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What’s the insider report on the Goodreads technical staff? Did they all quit after the site was bought? Did they stay, and they’re just coasting? Did Amazon ni

What’s the insider report on the Goodreads technical staff? Did they all quit after the site was bought? Did they stay, and they’re just coasting? Did Amazon nix the tech team? The site has received almost no technical improvements, so there’s clearly not an effective tech team anymore. Can someone at Amazon share the the gossip?

ggwareago 3y ago
Nothing salacious. People left over time. Maybe higher turnover than other Amazon orgs because change is harder there. >The site has received almost no technical improvements, Not true. Theyre under the surface or not webfacing. (Like Kindle integration) The biggest technical issue with Goodreads is this: the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there. Like way WAY more than you'd think unless you actively hunted through the webmap. There is an ongoing metaproject to detangle the spaghetti into an api that sits in front of the databases and deprecate the Rails hell pit (derisively called 'the monolith' internally). It's taken years. It is still in progress. It was started far too late in the game. When people talk about tech debt at Goodreads thats mainly what they mean.
- iamsomewalrus 3y ago
  ^ I can vouch for this. Worked at Goodreads from about 2013 to 2017 ish. I’m sure my name haunts git blame now.
- stevebmark 3y ago
  As a non-useful aside: That's funny to me, the painful UI of Goodreads smelled like Rails to me. It's engineers trying to solve problems "the Rails way" which leads to poorly designed forms, UX, errors reported to the user, etc. It feels similar to Basecamp, which was notoriously so hard to update that they made version 3 and 4 instead of just improving the existing site. Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.

ggwareago 3y ago

Nothing salacious. People left over time. Maybe higher turnover than other Amazon orgs because change is harder there. >The site has received almost no technical improvements, Not true. Theyre under the surface or not webfacing. (Like Kindle integration) The biggest technical issue with Goodreads is this: the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there. Like way WAY more than you'd think unless you actively hunted through the webmap. There is an ongoing metaproject to detangle the spaghetti into an api that sits in front of the databases and deprecate the Rails hell pit (derisively called 'the monolith' internally). It's taken years. It is still in progress. It was started far too late in the game. When people talk about tech debt at Goodreads thats mainly what they mean.

iamsomewalrus 3y ago
^ I can vouch for this. Worked at Goodreads from about 2013 to 2017 ish. I’m sure my name haunts git blame now.
stevebmark 3y ago
As a non-useful aside: That's funny to me, the painful UI of Goodreads smelled like Rails to me. It's engineers trying to solve problems "the Rails way" which leads to poorly designed forms, UX, errors reported to the user, etc. It feels similar to Basecamp, which was notoriously so hard to update that they made version 3 and 4 instead of just improving the existing site. Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.