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The Big Switch: How We Rebuilt Wanelo from Scratch and Lived to Tell About It

27 points by thinker 14y ago

tdg 14y ago
First of all, congratulations on what seems to be a very well executed rewrite. That being said, it will be interesting to see how this compares to all the stories about dangers of rewriting. I definitely want to see an update in a few months about the results.
- kristinatastic 14y ago
  We launched the rewrite a few months ago, the site is working wonderfully :).
- jspiral 14y ago
  The facts of this case seem to tilt things in favor of a rewrite more than other other examples I've seen. - reasonable confidence that large portions of the current codebase are truly dead - lack of tests in the existing codebase - a fair amount of real world experience showing higher productivity in rails over java web stacks - a problem domain that the decision makers can actually wrap their heads around (vs a legacy system that manages commercial mortgage repackaging or something where there is no one person who actually understands everything important that the system does) - a new development team who's going to have learning curve anyway this seems like about the perfect situation for starting over. congrats!
m104 14y ago
Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite. Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who specialize in rewriting working-but-just-barely apps completely from scratch. As those teams get better at doing this kind of work (and their clients prosper!), more companies will start to seriously consider the re-write option. Who knows, a whole industry could form just for app rewrites.
- siberianfruit 14y ago
  I'd say that if anything could be formalized as a set of skills or as a process that could be applied to multiple projects, it would be extreme discipline around what gets built. For example, we were fairly militant about cutting features and keeping things as simple as possible, which is always easier said than done. Also, this rewrite wouldn't be possible without each team member's personal productivity which was also aided by pairing. Curiously, we worked fairly regular days (although some nights and weekends, but those were by personal choice).

27 points by thinker 14y ago

tdg 14y ago

First of all, congratulations on what seems to be a very well executed rewrite. That being said, it will be interesting to see how this compares to all the stories about dangers of rewriting. I definitely want to see an update in a few months about the results.

kristinatastic 14y ago
We launched the rewrite a few months ago, the site is working wonderfully :).
jspiral 14y ago
The facts of this case seem to tilt things in favor of a rewrite more than other other examples I've seen. - reasonable confidence that large portions of the current codebase are truly dead - lack of tests in the existing codebase - a fair amount of real world experience showing higher productivity in rails over java web stacks - a problem domain that the decision makers can actually wrap their heads around (vs a legacy system that manages commercial mortgage repackaging or something where there is no one person who actually understands everything important that the system does) - a new development team who's going to have learning curve anyway this seems like about the perfect situation for starting over. congrats!

m104 14y ago

Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite. Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who specialize in rewriting working-but-just-barely apps completely from scratch. As those teams get better at doing this kind of work (and their clients prosper!), more companies will start to seriously consider the re-write option. Who knows, a whole industry could form just for app rewrites.

siberianfruit 14y ago
I'd say that if anything could be formalized as a set of skills or as a process that could be applied to multiple projects, it would be extreme discipline around what gets built. For example, we were fairly militant about cutting features and keeping things as simple as possible, which is always easier said than done. Also, this rewrite wouldn't be possible without each team member's personal productivity which was also aided by pairing. Curiously, we worked fairly regular days (although some nights and weekends, but those were by personal choice).