Never Rewrite! And other advice for SaaS Developers
You are a founding engineer at a SaaS startup. You built the MVP, and to everyone's great delight - usage is picking up. What's next?
In this episode, Jeffrey shares how a messy MVP can gradually evolve into a scalable SaaS product. We discuss the critical design decisions engineers have to make in the early days of building the product: Tabs or spaces, pooled tenants or siloed, Micro-services or monolith... And who makes these decisions.
Jeffrey Sherman is a staff engineer, scalability, and performance lead at Active Campaign - and was recently recognized as SaaS Developer Hero for his contributions to this community.
Jeffery has his own podcast, @NeverRewrite , where you can find him with more good advice and funny stories every single week.
P.S. I had a bit of construction going on while recording. I tried my best, but you'll hear hammers in the background. So sorry!
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00:00 intro
01:42 SaaS Developer Community Flywheel
03:45 Heroic Keyboard
04:36 Why never rewrite?
07:32 Shipping with Ship of Theseus
8:58 What about "build MVP and throw away"?
10:57 Build toward incremental replacement
13:21 Microservices vs Monolith
14:43 When to decompose the monolith?
17:03 Consistency vs Creativity
20:00 Top down or bottom up decisions?
23:00 The Drop-Doom Anti-Pattern
26:40 Always multi-tenant
27:14 Be multi-lingual
27:48 API first
29:00 Testing Tips
30:40 Decompose rather than rewrite - Live