Rewriting Software At GOTO Conf Chicago 2014: Mike Hall Interviews Camille Fournier | GOTO Conference 2014
Rewriting Software At GOTO Conf Chicago 2014: Mike Hall Interviews Camille Fournier | GOTO Conference 2014
🚀 Camille Fournier shares her experience leading a major rewrite of Rent the Runway's legacy Drupal system into a Ruby frontend, Java SOA backend platform. Learn the key principles for a successful rewrite and how to overcome cultural resistance. Don't miss this! 🌐 #softwareengineering #rewrite #devops #GOTOConference2014 #CamilleFournier #Just3WsInterviews
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at GOTO Conference 2014. I'm standing here with Camille Fournier, who gave a talk about the great rewrites. Or, well, if you should, maybe it's not so great. Yeah. You know, should you have a rewrite? Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. So your talk, what was the title of it again?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
It was, "So You Want to Rewrite That. " "So You Want to Rewrite That. " Okay. So it sounds like a little bit of pain to get to that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So can you share a little bit about what your experience was? Sure.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So I just led Rent the Runway through a big rewrite of our legacy sort of ugly Drupal system into a Ruby frontend, Java SOA backend platform. Before I want to ask Rent the Runway. Yes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
What is, what is that real quick?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Rent the Runway is renttherunway. com. We are a e-commerce website. We do designer dress and accessory short-term rentals to women.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And we are actually, you know, you may, you are not our target demographic, but probably you know someone that at least knows of us or even has used us. We have many, many customers throughout the United States.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So you were saying that you had a Drupal application that you rewrote into a Java SOA architecture and then I interrupted you. Yes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So, you know, I basically joined the company when we were first starting to think about this rewrite and led the team through it. And it took us about, well, it took us about two, a little more than two years to get to all of the major consumer facing, customer facing pages out of Drupal. Um, we still have administrative pages in Drupal.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So this experience is really interesting for me because it just got me interested in why do people rewrite? What makes them successful? What doesn't make a rewrite successful?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
I think every software engineer is going to have to rewrite something at some point in their career. Probably at some point, you're going to do one of these really big rewrites.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So how do you think about it? What are the principles you should think about in going into this process to hopefully make it more successful? Because rewrites tend to come from a place of failure, right?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
You're failing in some way, or you see that you're going to fail in some way. It's failures on the horizon. Um, and so, you know, it's very easy for a rewrite itself to fail because you're already in precarious, you know, in a precarious place.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
How do you, you know, think about it to make it successful? Okay.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And so it sounded like you did a gradual evolutionary kind of iteration away from this, this monolithic architecture. You didn't just gut the system and then replace it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Um, yes, I would say that the number one thing that we did right was we did a very iterative, slow rollout. So we would take logic that was in Drupal. We would move it into Java and put the, put that behind API calls in Drupal. And we did this for sort of core data and then core business logic. And then once we had done a sort of a good chunk, we started moving pages in Drupal out of Drupal and into Ruby. So we built a Ruby layer in such a way that it was a very thin client. It wasn't talking to the database in the way that our Drupal had been. It wasn't this sort of complex, you know, ball of wax. It was simply calling two Java services to get JSON data and, you know, maybe doing a little munging of that and showing it on the webpage. So the one thing coming from a cultural, um, community aspect is that there's a strong identity, uh, or tends to be a strong identity in the PHP community and a strong identity in the Java community. I'm a Java developer. I'm a PHP developer. Um, so when you're saying to the PHP developers, Hey, we're going to be taking your stuff and rewriting in Java.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
How did you kind of smooth the waters with that? Yeah.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Well, so. And avoid like insult like, oh, yeah.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
No, I mean, I think that's, I think that's a great question. And, you know, for better or worse, we just, you know, we had lost a lot of the original developers of Rent the Runway over the years, you know, had been written by an outsource team and then in-house. And I was not, you know, in great technical shape because it had so many owners that the team that was there writing the PHP, they were not so in love with the PHP. They weren't emotionally invested. They weren't as emotionally invested. They were mostly like exhausted because they were supporting this thing that kept breaking. So I think in their minds, anything to make their support burden a little bit easier and, you know, take care of some of this complexity and allow them to focus more on getting features out more quickly. I think the real thing is that developers want to ship. For the most part, developers really care about shipping, especially at a company like Rent the Runway. And so our rewrite was always sold to them as this will let you ship faster, better, you know, with much less pain. And, and it did that. And I think that helps with that. And, you know, coming here to GOTO Conference, the presentation you wrote, was it based off of your, strictly off of your experiences at Rent the Runway or have you felt this pain before?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
And are you reflecting your previous experiences?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So I have really felt this pain to some extent before. I had never done a major rewrite like this. I had done a lot of actual like sort of refactors in place where I think with a different team would have resulted in a major rewrite that may or may not have been successful. But I actually talked to a lot of colleagues and friends outside of the company that I knew had either done rewrites, considered rewrites, not done them. I read a lot of stories and a lot of articles by people who had, you know, successfully or, you know, not successfully done rewrites because I think that this is a common thing. You know, developers do this at some point in their career. And so I wanted to get more perspectives other than my own as to why people do this and what makes them successful or not. And just to kind of wrap up, are any resources that you read or how did you maybe look outside of your own experiences to get more information about how to approach this?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Did you read like the Refactor book or anything? I mean, I read, what did I read?
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So I read some blog posts. There's some blog posts actually, it's really interesting about like six or seven or eight years ago, there was sort of a flurry of don't rewrite that blog posts, which are really interesting and actually worth reading. I think, you know, these things come in cycles, people write about them and then we all forget. And then we all make a bunch of mistakes and then we relearn about them. Um, so I read a bunch of those. I read a little bit about the, you know, Twitter has a pretty good blog post about their rewrite. And I also talked to people that were there, um, and worked through that. Um, I did a lot of talking to friends too. So reaching out and just reaching out.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Camille Fournier
rewriting software at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And just asking people like for their experiences. If you know someone who's been a software developer for 15 or 20 years, you probably know someone that's done this scene that's been around for this and has some opinions.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you. [Music]