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RubyConf 2019 - Late, Over Budget, & Happy: Our Service Extraction Story by Amy Newell & Nat Budin A 3-month project stretches out to 9 months. It's widely viewed as over-engineered and difficult to work with. But months after deployment, it's considered successful. What happened? In this talk, a principal engineer and a director of engineering recount the extraction of a social feeds GraphQL service from a decade-old Rails monolith. Along the way, we'll cover topics including selling a big project, complexity in remote work, complexity in deployments, and complexity in emotions. We'll tell you about the scars we acquired and the lessons we learned. #rubyconf2019 #confreaks
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The video titled "Late, Over Budget, & Happy: Our Service Extraction Story" presented by Amy Newell and Nat Budin at RubyConf 2019 discusses the challenges and successes of extracting a GraphQL service from a long-standing Rails monolith at PatientsLikeMe. The project initially estimated to take three months extended to nine months, prompting a reflection on the lessons learned throughout the experience. Key points of the presentation include: - **Project Background**: The background at PatientsLikeMe, focusing on the social network's needs, particularly for chronic condition patients, and the struggles of their monolithic architecture, particularly slow loading times for user feeds. - **Initial Solutions**: The implementation of Redis for caching user feeds, which improved load times but led to a cap in growth due to mismanagement of resources. - **Service Extraction Rationale**: The need to transition from a monolithic structure to a microservices architecture to enable more efficient changes and updates, sparked by issues with the pre-existing system's coupling and clutter. - **Emotional and Management Challenges**: The presentation highlights the emotional complexities involved in leadership, especially when friends work together, and how personal mental health challenges impacted the project timeline and team dynamics. - **Project Lessons**: Important lessons included the necessity of selling and marketing the project upfront, maintaining a collaborative team environment, and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy by ensuring transparency and support from the start. - **Deployment Success**: By mid-2017, despite delays, the Newswire service was successfully shipped, demonstrating the significance of resilience in projects, and the eventual positive outcomes, including improved user feeds and new application features. - **Future Implications**: The experience underscored that engineering projects can feel risky but highlighted the importance of learning from both successes and setbacks, recognizing how adequate resource management and emotional awareness can influence project outcomes. Overall, Newell and Budin concluded that while their project faced significant challenges, it ultimately succeeded and transformed their services, leading to greater flexibility and responsiveness for users.
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