Lessons Learned from a Re(design|write)

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Lessons Learned from a Re(write|design) Diving into the world of feature-ﬂipping, performance optimization and removing of technical debt.

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Adam McKerlie WWCC 2 About me Hi, I’m Adam McKerlie. I’m a python developer at G Adventures. I like good beer, optimizing SQL queries and making stuff run. You can contact me at Twitter @adammckerlie IRC silent1mezzo Web procrastinatingdev.com

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Adam McKerlie 3 Then vs Now

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Adam McKerlie 4 Why Rewrite a Working Application? • Other teams were using Python/Django • Codebase was getting unmaintainable • Easier to hire

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How Did We Do It?

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Two Applications One Login

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Adam McKerlie 7 • Authenticated on the PHP side • PHP sent a request to Django with the username, password hash and secret • Authenticated in Django when the user visited the site

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One App at a Time

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Adam McKerlie 9 • Built what we thought users would need the most • Speciﬁcations from Business • Launched side-by-side with old site • Turned off old site once we conﬁrmed everything was working

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Feature Flipping

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Adam McKerlie WWCC 11 • Django Wafﬂe (https://github.com/jsocol/django-wafﬂe) • Views • Templates

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Contest Rollout

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Adam McKerlie 13 • Small core group of users • We gave out invites to those users when they suggested ideas • Those invites were then sent out to other users • Eventually we ﬂipped the ﬂag for everyone

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Template Structure

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Adam McKerlie 15 • New design moved to new/ • Same for Static

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Realization #1 Speciﬁcations Change Quickly

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Adam McKerlie WWCC 17 • Don’t get too attached • Need to know the business to anticipate changes • Learn to say no

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Realization #2 Your Users aren’t Always Right

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Adam McKerlie 19 • They only know from what they’ve seen • They don’t know the technology • You can tell them what they want • Be ready to learn from them

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Realization #2 The ORM is Great...Until it’s Not

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Adam McKerlie Realization #2 The ORM is Great...Until it’s Not 21 Bad

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Adam McKerlie Realization #2 The ORM is Great...Until it’s Not 22 Better

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Adam McKerlie Realization #2 The ORM is Great...Until it’s Not 23 Wat?

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Adam McKerlie Realization #2 The ORM is Great...Until it’s Not 24 Best

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Adam McKerlie 25 • Can produce some very weird (slow) joins • Hundreds of fast queries can kill a page • One slow query can also kill a page

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Realization #4 People with Slow Internet Connections Don’t Notice Performance Gains

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Adam McKerlie WWCC 27 • When they’re used to waiting a few minutes per page load, 45 second page decrease doesn’t make much of a difference • Youtube

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Realization #5 Simple Features get the Most Praise

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Adam McKerlie 29 • Lots of feedback and praise • *Crickets*

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Realization #6 People Don’t Use Your Application in Ways You Expect

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Adam McKerlie 31 • Saving after every change instead of a ﬁnal save • Importance of seeing what your users do • Mixpanel, Clicktale, In Person

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Thanks! Questions?