The Clean Up Crew: Maintaining the Monolith
There have been many talks from various startups about making the next evolutionary step in their engineering architecture. Topics from service oriented architectures to distributed databases are common. What is less frequently talked about is the brave individuals who must help maintain the legacy codebase during these times of transition. The clean up crew.
Our session will talk about how SoundCloud has moved from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a service oriented architecture. We will discuss the challenges of maintaing the monolith, how we determine extractable components, deal with capacity planning, and how we have dealt with organizational and communication issues as the number of teams and number of codebases grows within our engineering department. We will discuss how we extract less-than-ideal code in a responsible and timely manner.
Presenters
Edmund Salvacion
Backend Software Engineer
SoundCloud
Edmund Salvacion has worked for plenty of startups in the San Francisco area including StumbleUpon and SoundTracking before moving to Berlin to work with SoundCloud as a backend engineer.
Tom Stuart
Backend Software Engineer
SoundCloud
Tom Stuart has worked at SoundCloud as a backend engineer for two years and has seen the company evolve from a technical and organizational perspective. He has 7 years professionally in development/ops, part time/hobbyist for 6 before that