Brian Genisio at LeadDev West Coast 2023
summary
Khan Academy completes a full backend rewrite called Goliath over 3.5 years, replacing over one million lines of code, moving from Python 2.7 to Go, monolith to services, REST to GraphQL, and adding Fastly edge caching and a GraphQL gateway. The effort consumes almost 50 person‑years, involves 100+ engineers and ~3,000 Jira tickets, finishes 4 days before contractual deadline, uses side-by-side field testing to avoid regressions and ships with no downtime.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Goliath rewrite project
- 1:45Minimal viable experience
- 3:09Challenges in three-year rewrite
- 4:12Go for backend choice
- 5:15Side-by-side testing migration
- 6:43GraphQL federation hurdles
- 7:06Waterfall planning fixed scope
- 8:30Managing critical path deadlines
- 9:53Results after eight months
related talks
32mHow we drive Developer Productivity at Yelp
32mBuilding a GenAI-Driven Developer Organization
32mBuilding Platform Engineering from scratch at scale up
51mScaling Sustainable Innovation through Team Autonomy
30mProduction › Prototype: How a Small Team Replaced a Core Platform in 90 Days
45mFrom 5 to 100 in Product Development team in just 5 years
31mBuilding new on top of old: the argument for simplicity
40mA Developer’s Tour in 360 Days