Scaling Happiness Horizontally

This talk will discuss how Gilt has grown its technology organization to optimize for engineer autonomy and happiness and how that optimization has affected its software. Conway's Law states that an organization that designs systems will inevitably produce systems that are copies of the communication structures of the organization. This talk will work its way between both the (gnarly) technical details of Gilt's application architecture (something we internally call "LOSA") and the Gilt Tech organization structure. I'll discuss the technical challenges we came up against, and how these often pointed out areas of contention in the organization. I'll discuss quorums, failover, and latency in the context of building a distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer technical organization.

Presented at RICON|East 2013

Transcript

1. Scaling Happiness Horizontally Mark Wunsch @markwunsch
4. Agenda ‣ Gilt Organization ‣ Gilt Architecture ‣ Organization ⟳ Architecture
5. Conway’s Law “Organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
6. Conway’s Law? “Organizations which design systems…are doomed to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
11. shared nothing architecture
12. “Resources”
13. ‣ Front End Engineer ‣ Back End Engineer ‣ UX Designer ‣ Visual Designer ‣ Product Manager ‣ Project Manager ‣ QA Engineer
14. Deadlock.
16. A monolith is a mutex.
18. highly concurrent, distributed, & fault tolerant
19. http://tmblr.co/ZcvzqxsOM8 Teams Ingredients Initiatives KPIs
20. Initiatives & KPIs
21. Teams & Ingredients
23. Hive Mind! vs Pen Pals! [^1] [^1]: http://livestre.am/3ZHDH
24. L O S A
25. Lots Of Small Applications
26. Fallacies of Distributed Computing Organizations 1. The network is reliable. 2. Latency is zero. 3. Bandwidth is infinite. 4. The network is secure. 5. Topology doesn’t change. 6. There is one administrator. 7. Transport cost is zero. 8. The network is homogeneous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing
27. Consistency& Availability& Partition Tolerance.
28. Consistency& Availability& Partition Tolerance. [^2] [^2]: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/
30. https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
33. http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-constraints
35. ␄
36. Appendix 1. http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_barber_problem 4. Scaling Agile at Gilt → http://tmblr.co/ZcvzqxsOM8 5. Code as Craft: Coda Hale → http://livestre.am/3ZHDH 6. The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing → http:// nighthacks.com/roller/jag/resource/Fallacies.html 7. http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ 8. http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process- constraints