Rebuilding Highrise from the Inside Out
summary
Highrise undergoes an inside-out rebuild while keeping customers live: the team keeps Rails 3 for compatibility, extracts specific subsystems as microservices reluctantly adopted to avoid huge rewrites, and ships small fixes fast to regain trust. They report over 1200 deployments in 18 months, operate on ~100M contacts and 32TB of user data, and deliver an iOS app, real‑time group inbox and bulk email backend — all deployed and used in production.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 3:57Understanding the legacy codebase
- 7:28Stage one confusion and momentum
- 11:39Stage two competency and trade-offs
- 16:13Stage three proficiency and microservices
- 19:43Results and future plans
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