Growing Pains: Scaling and Re-architecting Apps Under Fire
summary
A Reddit Android platform team describes a multi-year Kotlin migration that starts with file-by-file conversions, hits a risky last mile with the main Activity, and finishes only after adding tests, measuring build time and developer velocity, and removing RX Java in favor of coroutines adoption. Platform work includes modularization, a DI owner, Slack guilds and premortems and blameless postmortems/premortems. Success is sold to execs with incident stacks (eg P90 startup spikes to 12s) and hard buildtime or stability wins rather than vague developer love.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Scaling challenges intro
- 3:13Prioritizing engineering work
- 5:19Migrating from Java to Kotlin
- 13:06Selling engineering investments
- 18:44Steering migrations without scope creep
- 23:59Finishing migrations
- 27:59App performance and KPIs
- 31:31Culture of postmortems
- 36:06Complex migrations
- 39:34Closing remarks and Q&A
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