Overactive Vocabulary

When In Doubt, Ameliorate

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Refactoring to Services: Payoff

One of the most exciting things I’ve done in my professional life to date is recently deploying the first big piece of the ongoing process to break Spreedly up into a series of services. We took user account management and billing and split them out into their own service, and we did it gently, with no “big rewrite” or “stop the world switchover” putting the business into jeopardy.

Why add the overhead of extra services? And yes, they do have overhead - adding more moving parts always adds complexity. I want to talk a lot more in the coming days about what we did, how we did it, and what compelled us to go down this path, but today I’m just going to tease with the bottom line payoff of getting this first piece deployed:

4,328 Deletions

I just stripped over 4,000 lines of code from this app. That code doesn’t have to be loaded, supported, or secured any longer in this context. That’s what I call a win!