Enabling Experimentation

Embracing Experimentation
Enabling and exploiting a culture of experimentation within Energy
24 Sept 2010

Why is it Important?
Not experimenting means you’re not learning
Don’t know what you don’t know
Mediocrity
Stifle innovation and competitiveness
Only way to achieve significant improvements

Lack of Experimentation
Energy’s overarching domain
Complex admin tool
THE DATA PUSH (ongoing)
Untouchable code
Simple (complex) release process
“Why change it? You’ll only rewrite it the same.”

Enabling Experimentation
Less-coupled more modular structure
Distinct domain concepts
Model utility rather than reality
Ensure clear separation

Example: Bounded Context
Logically and physically separated
Appropriate domain language
Acknowledge and isolate interaction

Bounded Contexts
Importing Rate Cards
Pricing plans and performing comparisons
Switching a customers energy supplier

Experimenting with Comparison
Price energy plans based on user profiles
Lots of calculations
Transforming a lot of data
Can’t be a bottle neck

Experimenting with Tools varnish Mongo compojure Tariff Editor mysql sinatra Home Movers sinatra Comparison

Issues with Experimentation
New language idioms
New development environment
Deployment
Demands your own interest and investment
#fail?

Clojure Tools
Actually lots of similarity to Ruby
rake/gem -> lein
irb -> lein repl
rack -> ring
sinatra -> compojure
Capistrano still works for deploys

Experimentation Rewards
Functional programming (and Clojure) great fit for our problem
Resulting code is smaller and more succinct
Higher-order functions provide powerful composition
More to come... protocols, partial fns, macros etc.
Fast enough : >100 requests/second
No complex AOT caching
Simpler deployments

#win
Modularity exposed way to break down problem
Break problems apart and you can solve everything in the most effective way
Small composable services with bounded contexts encouraged experimentation
Produced a tighter codebase with simpler deployment
No caching needed : performance allows realtime updates

#win
Good people , experimentation , and technology has built a far more capable , flexible , scalable solution than with ‘obvious’ tools
You don’t know unless you try

Clojure #win
Coming soon to a project near you
Demo/up-and-running with Clojure later this afternoon

Questions?

k’thx bye... until this afternoon

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Enabling Experimentation

by mik3jon3s on Oct 10, 2010

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Enabling Experimentation — Presentation Transcript