Originally written on December 31, 2017
If you’re keeping track at Part XII, we’ve gone through half of 2010 and all of 2011. It’s currently the last day of 2017, the temperature is -10F in Minneapolis going down to something around -20F later tonight. Whatever plans we might have come up with to celebrate the New Year got shelved for the option of staying home and being warm. Instead, let’s recap the story so far…
If you remember, I came to Best Buy in mid-2010 ostensibly to join a team rewriting BestBuy.com. I took a role as a Hadoop Architect because for the previous two years I had been trying to start a Big Data consulting practice within the consulting company I was working for at the time. It was a few years too early for Big Data consulting so I jumped at the chance to put into practice everything I had been discussing with companies around town. But, that didn’t happen because the Hadoop project was killed before I even started. Instead I worked on Chef and learned Infrastructure as Code in the AWS cloud while establishing an automated testing team using JBehave to try and put in place functional testing of BestBuy.com before making massive changes to the codebase.
While everyone knew BestBuy.com was failing and needed help, there was no clear path and no engineering team that owned the site. It had been operated as a dumping ground for external integrator’s code for so long that everyone and no one claimed ownership. A separate team had sprung up to write the mobile site and their express purpose was to obsolete BestBuy.com. The Enterprise IT team claimed ownership but the best they could do was point to all the developers from Accenture and WiPro working on various projects.
In these conditions, out team of seven architects began to claim ownership by asserting that, as employees of Best Buy, we were responsible for the build and operation of the site. There was little resistance at first, no one wanted BestBuy.com in 2010, it was seen as a sideline business, a necessary evil that distracted from the true engine of the company, big box stores.
However, the journey was not destined to be easy or straight, and the architect that hired us all left in March of 2011 as the funding for our rewrite was cut in half. It was in this limbo state that I gained the support of the architecture team and we collaborated to put forth a plan to rewrite BestBuy.com. I began selling the plan across Best Buy and gained a small amount of interest. But when the CEO declared we would double our ecommerce revenue in three years, my plan took off, because, it was the only plan available.
As we start 2018, I’ll harken back to 2012 and the twists and turns required to put in place the first layered cloud distributed service oriented ecommerce platform built by a major retailer.
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