Over the past 3 years FreshBooks has incrementally rebuilt its primary product, replacing an un-maintainable spaghetti monster with a service oriented architecture.

1. FreshBooks
Spaghetti to service oriented

3. In the Beginning
We head back to 2003

4. PHP4

5. MySQL 4
MyISAM, and latin1 for all the things.

6. Deploy with Dreamweaver

7. But the product was
great, and customers
loved it.

9. Technical Debt had
Spiralled out of Control

10. Development Slowed

11. The Flying Spaghetti Monster cc by John Dill

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

13. Challenges

14. Code Stew

15. Copy Pasta

16. Every Customer had their
own Database Tables

17. Unit Tests were not
Reliable

18. XSS, SQL Injection and
Then Some

20. 3 years later…

21. 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

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

23. Collective Effort

24. Build Trust
Without trust you are unlikely to get autonomy

25. Alignment
Between Business and Development Leaders

26. Alignment
Amongst Developers

27. Make Friends
Developers + Design + Product Owners

28. Hire the best
That you can find & afford

29. Super Tech

30. Better, not Perfect
Getting things finished counts more

31. Incremental Progress
Deliver value and improvements gradually

32. Amortize Refactoring
Build improvement costs and tests into new work.

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

34. Build Smaller
Applications
But not too small…

35. Painter tools CC by-nc-nd Chap_D
Solid Tools

36. Master a few Tools
Avoid the temptation of hip trends

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

38. wallpoper.com
Planning

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

40. Be Ambitious
Have big goals and small milestones

41. Concentrate
Specialize in a few frameworks/libraries

42. In Closing,

43. You can defeat
the Monster
We did.

44. Thanks
https://joind.in/15740
twitter - @mark_story
github - markstory