PicPay is the largest digital wallet in Latin America. We offer peer-to-peer payments, BNPL, credit cards, personal loans, insurance, investing, trading, and other financial products to 60 million people and 5 million merchants, processing over $20 billion yearly. But just three years ago, in 2019, PicPay was 30 engineers in a small office working on a single product for a few million users. Growing our product portfolio, team size, and the number of transactions by several orders of magnitude so quickly was as chaotic as you might imagine—but we've done it! Our approach gave teams and engineers radical autonomy to choose the best tool, process, and technology for their area. This strategy was invaluable in handling hypergrowth, but as we stabilize as a business and product, we have realized that what took us here isn't what will keep us moving forward. In this talk, let's explore the consequences of how we dealt with our hypergrowth phase and what are the changes and initiatives we have put in place to make sure that we keep growing and pushing the envelope—but at a manageable pace this time around. Phil Calçado is the Global CTO at PicPay. Before PicPay, Phil was Senior Director of Engineering at SeatGeek, leading the team that built the live events platform used by 44 million people worldwide. He has also led the platform team at Meetup/WeWork, worked on Linkerd - the pioneering Service Mesh, and headed product engineering for DigitalOcean and SoundCloud, both pioneers in adopting Microservices architectures. https://plus.qconferences.com/plus2022/presentation/afterparty-refactoring-after-100x-hypergrowth

1. the
afterparty
refactoring after 100x
hypergrowth
Phil Calçado
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

2. when you are there
for the pre-game
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

3. think city
planner,
not
bricklayer

4. @pcalcado | philcalcado.com
de
fi
ne some constraints and seeds and let the
computer’s randomness generate content
procedural generation:

5. @pcalcado | philcalcado.com
procedural generation:
de
fi
ne some constraints and seeds and let the
computer’s randomness generate content
your
organization’s

7. Team Size
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

8. when you get in for
the afterparty
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

9. disclaimer:
this is wip
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

10. 1. stop the bleed
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11. make explicit the rules
you want to follow
even if not strictly
enforced
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

12. 1. rapid provisioning of compute
2. basic monitoring
3. rapid deployment
4. easy provisioning of storage
5. easy access to the edge
6. authentication/authorization
7. standardized RPC
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com
https://philcalcado.com/2017/06/11/calcados_microservices_prerequisites.html

13. make work visible
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

14. https://philcalcado.com/2018/11/19/a_structured_rfc_process.html

15. 2. don’t miss the
forest for the trees
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

16. fi
x any
hot potatoes
immediately
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17. but don’t get too
distracted with
individual services
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18. apply the
clay-to-rocks
layering model
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

19. clay: high churn;
small blast radius
https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

20. rock: super stable;
enables almost
every feature
https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

21. https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

22. https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

23. apply the
edge-internal-external
layering model
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

24. edge: exposed to
the outside world
https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

25. internal: only used
inside your vpn
https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

26. external: make
calls to services
outside your vpn
https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

27. https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

28. https://philcalcado.com/2018/09/24/services_layers.html

29. 3. don’t panic
@pcalcado | philcalcado.com

30. don’t try to
boil the
ocean

31. @pcalcado | philcalcado.com
instagram.com/snarky_the_pup

32. @pcalcado | philcalcado.com