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As Rubyists, we see the value in refactoring. When Fullscreen started experiencing serious growth and our team started to grow with it, the excitement and glamour of being a successful startup quickly wore off as a far-reaching engineering initiative began looking insurmountable. In this talk, I will discuss how applying software development best practices to how we ran our team turned it into one that runs at scale, shipping new things more frequently than ever before with less stress than ever. Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/FG2r/
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In his talk titled "Refactoring Your Team For Fun and Profit," Aaron Harpole, the Director of Happiness at Fullscreen, discusses the challenges and solutions surrounding the growth of their engineering team as they scaled from a startup to a significant player in the media industry. Fullscreen, a company primarily known for its vast YouTube network, experienced rapid growth, leading to operational challenges within their engineering team. During the talk, Harpole highlights the following key points: - **Company Background**: Fullscreen is one of the largest YouTube networks, with over 30,000 channels and 300 million subscribers, having grown significantly since its inception three years prior to the talk. - **Growth Challenges**: The rapid increase in staff size pressured their existing systems, particularly their product dashboard, leading to operational inefficiencies and general errors. - **Dashboard Inefficacy**: The dashboard became overloaded with unrelated tasks, prompting the need for a comprehensive rewrite. Harpole describes it as a 'Yamaha app' due to its multiple roles. - **Need for Refactoring**: After discussions about their issues and the mistakes made, including the use of MongoDB for inappropriate tasks, the team determined that a rewrite of the dashboard was necessary. - **Service-Oriented Architecture**: He emphasizes the transition to a service-oriented architecture, breaking the dashboard into smaller, more manageable services to streamline operations. However, initial progress was slow due to ongoing demands and a lack of coherent planning. - **Implementation Strategies**: Harpole shares the team's approach to refactoring, expressing that while they recognized the need for change, actual implementation was hindered by existing duties and a lack of clear direction. - **Challenges of Scaling**: As the engineering team grew, shipping new updates became increasingly difficult, leading to a situation where they needed to expedite changes while managing the pressure from the business side for new features. In conclusion, Harpole's talk emphasizes the importance of adapting software development practices to team organization and operations, allowing them to improve efficiency despite challenges. The core takeaway is that structured approaches like service-oriented architecture can significantly enhance productivity within growing teams, enabling them to deliver more effectively and with less stress.
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