Cal Henderson
speaker
260 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2022
last heard Mar 2022
Cal Henderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That was certainly the case for us if we had decided from the very beginning to build for the massive scale that we have today.
But as you say, it's a sweet spot between like just building for next week versus the kind of architecture astronaut of before we even have any customers on this product, we're going to build it for a billion people.
And that might
might be a problem that you actually need to solve if you're Google and you're launching a new product, but more or less no organizations need need to solve for that.
However, there have been some pretty big kind of
you know, technology breaks internally.
One was so if you're familiar with the product, people use Slack on mobile and on desktop and on on desktop our core kind of client.
We reached a point
five years ago now where we realized that the the complexity of what we'd built was just not from like a customer usage point of view but just from uh the way we built the code as the team had grown from one person working on it to a hundred people working on it to two hundred people was just so impenetrably complicated that we couldn't make any changes to it.
They would take way too long, everything would break.
So we're like, all right, we're gonna have a massive effort involving 50 people to completely rewrite this.
Every line every line of code from scratch.
It took about two years.
And, you know, throughout that process, we had to figure out how can we how can we make that into something that delivers incremental value.
So we don't want to just be like nothing at all delivered to customers for two years and then a big bang, because that will almost certainly take longer than two years and be a disaster.
But also we know that it will be a bit more expensive if we figure out a way in which we can do it incrementally.
So we figured out a way, a mechanism via which we ended up writing
Rewriting 100% of the lines of code, which is millions of lines of code, but that delivered a little bit of performance, a little bit more feature, you know, kind of month on month to our customers and ended us up in a better position.
And I think any large-scale technology product, technology platform, you're either in a situation where you're on kind of like a long, slow decline and everything is gradually aging out and uh becoming less and less maintainable, or you're in a constant overlap.
Overlapping set of migrations, whatever that means.
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