FreshBooks
Spaghetti to service oriented

In the Beginning
We head back to 2003

PHP4

MySQL 4
MyISAM, and latin1 for all the things.

Deploy with Dreamweaver

But the product was
great, and customers
loved it.

Technical Debt Quickly
Spiralled out of Control

Development Slowed

The Flying Spaghetti Monster cc by John Dill

FreshApp API
Internet
Live DBs
Rabbit MQ
Bloom
Cloud files.
Lucre
Warehouse
Nginx load balancer
eventfeeder
Repeater
warehouse scripts
website
Evolve

Challenges

Each Customer had their
own Database Tables

Unit Tests were not
Reliable

XSS, SQL Injection and
Then Some

Code Stew

Escape Hatch cc by-nc-nd Sam Whitfield

3 years later…

FreshApp API
Internet
Live DBs
Rabbit MQ
Domain services
Frontend services
MQ consumers.
Connect to various integrations / services
Bloom
Data storage services
Cloud files.
Lucre
Internal Tools
* Some connections have been omitted for clarity.
Warehouse DatamartReporting ETL
Redis
Masterlock
MySQL
ASM
Nginx load balancer
Payments
eventfeeder
Mail Sniper
Funneling
Tolar
Banksiphon
Notify
Repeater
Manifestio
Afliliates
accountant-
leads
Supporter
Uploadr
warehouse scripts
freshbooks-ios
Mobile clients
freshbooks-android
MySQL
newman
refunder
statamic
Marketing website
multi-channel-tracker
receipts
cardspark
Evolve

How we did it
and how you might be able to.

The Tandem cc by-nc-sa Alex Bikes

Build Trust
Without trust you are unlikely to get autonomy

Alignment
Between Business and Development Leaders

Alignment
Amongst Developers

Make Friends
Developers + Design + Product Owners

Hire the best
That you can find & afford

rover 200 framing line cc by-nd spencer cooper

Better, not Perfect
Getting things finished counts more

Incremental Progress
Deliver value and improvements gradually

Amortize Refactoring
Build improvement costs and tests into new work.

Don’t Dig a
Deeper Hole
Do new projects the ‘right’ way

Build Smaller
Applications

But not too small

Telescope cc by-nc Leslie Kalohi

Have a Vision
Knowing where you want to end up is essential

Be Ambitious
Have big goals and small milestones

Concentrate
Specialize in a few frameworks/libraries

Painter tools CC by-nc-nd Chap_D

Master a few Tools
Avoid the temptation of hip trends

Invest in Tooling
Continuous integration, and configuration management
pay off in the long term.

In Closing,

You can Recover from
a Spaghetti Monster
We did.

Thanks
https://joind.in/13338
!
twitter - @mark_story
github - markstory