Monthly Archives: September 2017

Architecture, Digital Ecommerce Transformation, Minneapolis, Software Development

A Digital Ecommerce Transformation – Disaster Strikes, Twice – Part VII

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Part VII – Start at the beginning with Part I

In late 2010 as budgets were being prepared for 2011, TWLER’s (The World’s Largest Electronics Retailer) fortunes were taking a nosedive. The stock price was steadily declining from the 40s to the 30s on its way to the 10s in 2011. In that environment, increasing the funding for the web architecture team to continue its revamp of TWLER.com must not have appeared as a viable project. The $7M in funding the VP Operations secured in 2010 was slashed to $3.5M for 2011. Disaster number one. It meant we had to cut back on projects and reduce headcount to meet that budget.

I was feeling restless with the limited ability to start new work and had found a CTO role at a local startup that I was considering. But even with the lowered funding, it was clear to me that TWLER.com had to be rewritten, and it was just a matter of time before someone got the funding to do it. Since there were three teams vying for that role, I felt that our team needed to take a larger effort towards securing the funding. I decided to pass on the CTO role in February of 2011 as I felt the team we had had the ability to accomplish the rewrite once the funding returned.

But, under the funding circumstances, the digital Chief Architect, Michael N., decided to pursue more interesting options as it was clear to him that TWLER wasn’t serious about investing in the TWLER.com rewrite. That bombshell was dropped on us in March of 2011 at the Mongolian Barbecue place nearby, which claimed the reputation for the exit announcement lunch after a few more exits were communicated at that restaurant. The team was devastated and left to consider our options. Most of us were prepared to leave. I was told later there was a deadpool started in the business side and I was on top of the list. However, I had just decided to rededicate towards the goal of the TWLER.com rewrite and, even though I was now angry I let the CTO opportunity slip by, I still knew this had to happen.

As the VP Operations was deciding whom to put in the role to manage the team, I knew I had to step up and lead. I hadn’t had much interaction with the VP and was sure she didn’t know my background in managing teams and delivering large projects. I had also just finished an MBA and was itching to use the new knowledge.

The VP began trying to find a replacement and began looking at recruiting a Chief Architect level dude from Accenture. While that architect was quite good if using the Accenture scale, we had worked with him enough to know he wasn’t cut out for the digital chief architect role and would have been a step down from any of us. We revolted en mass and made it clear we wouldn’t work for him.   That left the VP without a candidate and we all decided to work that way for a few months.

During that time, I slowly started making team decisions and pushing direction with the rest of the team, and everyone decided to follow. I had extensive experience taking over teams without direct authority as I did it at every consulting gig for the last 10 years; eventually the teams let me make the decisions. Additionally I made sure to get time with the VP and let her know what decisions the team was making to give her confidence we were making progress in this interim state.

But I knew the time had come to step up, it was time to put together a comprehensive plan to rewrite TWLER.com. I dropped all my current responsibilities and did what anyone at TWLER.com did when they were pursuing investment capital, made a deck.

GOTO Part VIII

Architecture, Digital Ecommerce Transformation, Minneapolis, Platform

A Digital Ecommerce Transformation – Fun With Clouds – Part VI

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Part VI – Start at the beginning with Part I

While the business was busy stuffing their sorrys in a sack, our team was having some fun.

From July of 2010 to April of 2011 my role on the team was Architect, it was probably one of the most productive stints I can remember. During that time I learned Infrastructure as Code by building servers for Artifactory, Confluence, Jira, Crowd, and a number of other products using Chef. There we were reading the insanely poor documentation on the Chef site, 4-5 of us all learning Chef at the same time trying to get something working. Chef is similar to Grails in my head, too many magic mushrooms growing everywhere. If something doesn’t work, it might be your code, but it might be some unknown configuration that you missed. However, once you know where the magic starts and ends, they can both be quite useful.

I spent days on end building and stripping down infrastructure in the AWS cloud. We learned about Availability Zones, and Regions and how to operate in multiple locations at once. We watched AWS go down two or three times in that period but managed to weather all those outages with a little luck and forethought. We talked to vendors and startups building tools for clouds. We talked to other consumer enterprises building high scale websites for customers. We spent a lot of time reading High Scalability and the first edition of The Art of Scalability.  We wrote up comparisons between Riak, Cassandra, MongoDB and HBase. We tried to decide what might work best for a new distributed item catalog. We guessed, and hoped we didn’t end up like the guy that picked Cassandra for Digg in 2010.

For better or worse, the Digg disaster and the good relationship we struck up with Basho led us to choose Riak for our first NoSQL system in late 2010. We had great collaboration with the Basho engineers, we were helping them find the bugs in their system but the underlying technology was rock solid. In six years Riak never failed us, the only times we had problems were completely self-inflicted.

In the end we had numerous systems operating in AWS. The first was the failover site mentioned in Part I. If TWLER.com went down, we would switch over to the browse only site in a few minutes. We got to exercise this capability more than once. The second was the build infrastructure, our Atlassian suite, Artifactory and Jenkins were all cloud deployed. What we learned running production systems in the AWS cloud gave us the confidence to push towards a whole new architecture for TWLER.com.

GOTO Part VII