How We Write the DRESS CODE

at Rent the Runway

Introductions!

Eric Weinstein@ericqweinstein

Tim Ricablanca@timx

@RTR_tech

● Founded in November 2009● Cinderella-Experience-as-a-ServiceTM*

● 40+ engineers / 10 Ruby committers● Operations:

○ Warehouse & Fulfillment in NJ○ Henri Bendel’s and HQ in NYC○ The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas

About Rent the Runway

* We made this up

Ruby at Rent the Runway

We use Sinatra for our front-end

. . . served by Unicorn, behind Nginx

. . . tested by RSpec and Jasmine

. . . talking to our APIs over Typhoeus

. . . deployed by Rake and Capistrano

Commit to a feature branch Pull Request

RSpec & Jasmine

Code review & mergeCode Climate

Deploy via CapistranoSelenium tests

Rubocop & JSHint

We deploy renttherunway.com every day.

Our deploys are boring and uneventful.

It took four devs, a systems engineer, and a team of QA engineers three months to get there.

Humble Beginnings:The Journey to Boring Deploys:

A Tuskforce Adventure

The Early Days

● Drupal on LAMP● No separation of concerns ● No database abstraction● Test coverage was questionable● <standard painful problem with legacy

software>

“You run your e-commerce site on Drupal?”

SOA and Salami Slicing

Our Runway

And then came the swimlanes

User

Checkout

Static Asset CDN Origin

Drupal

Our Runway

Home

Grid

Product Detail

static assets

sinatra views / erbs

< Sinatra::Base

RtR API clients

Heroku

Rackspace

Engine Yard

...but wait, there’s more:EACH ONE OF THE SWIMLANES HAD ITS OWN CDN AND MEMCACHED INSTANCE

“Deploying the website was like executing a lunar mission”

- Eric Q. Weinstein

“some m#%@&*s are always trying to ice skate uphill”

The swimlanes solved a scalability problem that we didn’t have.

We regressed at the cost of productivity, feature velocity, and developer happiness.

Organizational Buy-in

“Everyone deserves a Cinderella Experience”- Rent the Runway Core Value #1

(even developers!)

*queue the Tuskforce*

Storefront App

< Sinatra::Base

API Clients

*

(It’s this one)

It used to take two devs 6 hours to shepherd the deploy.

It now takes about 6 minutes.

FashionatorTM

FlaggregatorTM

Lessons Learned

● New tech stack: growing pains● YAGNI: don’t build what you don’t need● You can’t boil the ocean, but you can cause

global warming● Everyone deserves a Cinderella

experience—even developers!

Questions?