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> Meanwhile the developer that was quietly doing ongoing maintenance on the monolith had gradually broken out some key performance-critical elements into Scala

by mjr00 2y ago

> Meanwhile the developer that was quietly doing ongoing maintenance on the monolith had gradually broken out some key performance-critical elements into Scala and migrated away from the Ruby code for those features. Yep and that's what I've seen be successful: someone who really knows the existing code inside and out, warts and all, needs to be a key leader for the part being broken out into a separate system. The hard part isn't building the new system in these projects, it's the integration into the existing system, which always requires a ton of refactoring work.

cratermoon 2y ago
> needs to be a key leader for the part being broken out into a separate system Indeed, the developer was one of the best programmers I've known and absolutely the key person on the system. The New Guys Clique were the sort of developers, you might know some, who come in, look at the existing systems, decide it's all wrong and terrible, and set out to Do It Right.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  I've seen almost this exact scenario play out, although in my case it was just one person as opposed to a clique. He had just come from a much larger company in the same business, and almost right away he proposed that we should rearchitect a significant portion of our software to match the way things were done at his previous employer. His proposed architecture wasn't without elegance, but it was also more complex and, more importantly, it didn't solve any problems that we actually had. So in the end it was more of an ideological thing. He seemed to take it personally that we didn't take him up on his proposal, and he left a few months later (and went back to his previous employer, though to a different group). Don't think he was around for even a year. He wasn't young either; he was pretty experienced.
  - 59nadir 2y ago
    What was the language and proposed architecture? Nothing is quite as grating as being hired for work on an Erlang/Elixir code base and seeing basically no correct usage of the platform and it'd definitely result in an instant suggestion to start correctly leveraging Erlang, piece by piece. It's not even a question of architecture as much as it is completely ignoring what makes the platform good, IMO.
    - usefulcat 2y ago
      It was all c++. The existing architecture consisted of a number of different executables, which were mostly statically linked (except for stuff like the C and C++ runtime libs). His proposal was to factor out the business logic from each executable into a shared library, and then (if memory serves) we would only need a single executable that could work with any of these new shared libraries. Like a plugin architecture. This would mean that when rolling out a new version, usually only the shared library would need to be replaced. So.. significantly more complexity, due to now having a more arms-length interface between the executable and the business logic in the shared libraries. And the payoff was.. when deploying, we would upgrade a shared library instead of an executable? Still doesn't seem worthwhile.

by mjr00 2y ago

cratermoon 2y ago

> needs to be a key leader for the part being broken out into a separate system Indeed, the developer was one of the best programmers I've known and absolutely the key person on the system. The New Guys Clique were the sort of developers, you might know some, who come in, look at the existing systems, decide it's all wrong and terrible, and set out to Do It Right.

usefulcat 2y ago
I've seen almost this exact scenario play out, although in my case it was just one person as opposed to a clique. He had just come from a much larger company in the same business, and almost right away he proposed that we should rearchitect a significant portion of our software to match the way things were done at his previous employer. His proposed architecture wasn't without elegance, but it was also more complex and, more importantly, it didn't solve any problems that we actually had. So in the end it was more of an ideological thing. He seemed to take it personally that we didn't take him up on his proposal, and he left a few months later (and went back to his previous employer, though to a different group). Don't think he was around for even a year. He wasn't young either; he was pretty experienced.
- 59nadir 2y ago
  What was the language and proposed architecture? Nothing is quite as grating as being hired for work on an Erlang/Elixir code base and seeing basically no correct usage of the platform and it'd definitely result in an instant suggestion to start correctly leveraging Erlang, piece by piece. It's not even a question of architecture as much as it is completely ignoring what makes the platform good, IMO.
  - usefulcat 2y ago
    It was all c++. The existing architecture consisted of a number of different executables, which were mostly statically linked (except for stuff like the C and C++ runtime libs). His proposal was to factor out the business logic from each executable into a shared library, and then (if memory serves) we would only need a single executable that could work with any of these new shared libraries. Like a plugin architecture. This would mean that when rolling out a new version, usually only the shared library would need to be replaced. So.. significantly more complexity, due to now having a more arms-length interface between the executable and the business logic in the shared libraries. And the payoff was.. when deploying, we would upgrade a shared library instead of an executable? Still doesn't seem worthwhile.