The Rewrite, Part 1: Selections

26 Jun 2017

The door is open to for a complete overhaul of the backend so I’m enumerating backend/API functional and behavioral needs.

After a year of contracting with small companies, I took a full-time position at Choozle. The tech stack is an “interesting” assortment of home-grown PHP with a recent and refreshing addition of React.

For technical and business reasons, we decided to consider re-architecting the current PHP monolith into “something else.” We have the freedom to change everything, yes, Everything. Language. Architecture. Server setup. DB. Yep, everything.

Rather than copying and pasting from HackerNews “Best Techstacks Ever 2017”, I started to think about the behavioral and functional aspects of what we really need. I use the term “we” because I’m trying to think of what our entire tech team needs not just what I would prefer. What follows is a short, requirements focused list of things that I see us benefiting from. As a senior engineer/developer, I see my role as working within and alongside teams to move ideas from concept to reality in short timescales. Ideally, I’d like for us to ship alpha products in 3 weeks, and beta in 6 weeks*.

* Side note: I believe this 3 week metric encompasses non-technical aspects (team structure, experience level, etc). Let’s assume we’re set up for success on those fronts.

Deployment Environment:

• We’ll deploy dockerized apps into a Kubernetes cluster.

Frontend:

• We really like the react (w/ redux + webpack) setup we have.

Web tier:

• JSON rendering
• HTML rendering
• API versioning
• Authentication is dead-simple (session, jwt, or Oauth2)
• Authorization is dead-simple (maybe this is an implementation issue?)
• Easy access to HTTP header values.
• Well supported by 3rd party libraries (ie, copy and paste S3 setup)
• Popular on StackOverflow (let’s be honest)
• Easily integrate with selected ORM
• Built-in logging
• Testing support
• Able to make JSON responses performant (less than 10ms)
• Able to run code in a terminal quickly

ORM:

• MySQL compatible
• Easily execute simple SQL operations (e.g., User.where("email LIKE %?", "test@example.com").count)
• Handles relationships
• Handles validation
• Handles eager joins
• Handles pagination like operations well (limit, offset, ordering, etc)
• Handles scoping
• Allows you to put multiple operations in 1 SQL transaction
• Again, popular on StackOverflow (let’s be honest)
• Built-in logging
• Testing support
• Performant (how do we measure this?)
• Able to run code in a terminal quickly

Other things:

• I can execute DB fetches in a console/shell (for example, rails console, python manage.py shell)
• I can execute API calls in a console/shell
• I can run a debugger in the source code

Questions:

• Do we keep the API and React frontend in the same codebase or separate?
• What else am I missing?

Edits: added other things section.