text stringlengths 0 1.49k |
|---|
• Closing remarks and invitation to follow on social media. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's episode is number 54. On the show today we have myself, Erik; Brian is also here... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Hello! |
**Erik St. Martin:** And Carlisia... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Hi there! |
**Erik St. Martin:** And our special guest today is an engineer for Walmart, and he's gonna talk to us a little bit about distributed teamwork and some of the stuff that they're doing with Go over at Walmart. Please welcome to the show Chase Adams. |
**Chase Adams:** Hey, thanks for having me. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Hurray! |
**Erik St. Martin:** So you've been a long-time listener and follower of GoTime, so we're really excited to actually get you on and talk about some of the stuff that you're working on. |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I've been listening to the Changelog for a long time, and I always hoped there would be a good podcast about Go, and once GoTime came out, it was love at first sight. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** We're still hoping. Oh, sorry! \[laughter\] |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, I know where you're going, but I don't think that's true. I think there's a really good Go podcast out there. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So why don't you give everybody just a little bit of background, maybe about your history with Go and what you're doing at Walmart. |
**Chase Adams:** Sure. So I build software in Go for the Edge platform team at Walmart Labs. It was originally a company called Torbit and it was acquired in 2012; I've only been with the team since December of last year, but everyone still calls us the Torbit team, regardless of the fact that we're supposed to be the ... |
We do three main things for Walmart - we have our own reverse proxy, which does the asset and page optimization, so all the front-end optimization stuff. We have a homegrown CDN, and then we have a RAM system, and all that stuff's written in Go. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I can't get over the fact -- I talked to you about this a little bit at GopherCon... I can't get over the fact that you actually have your own homegrown CDN. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Right? |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, it's pretty cool. Most of the people on the team have been working on the CDN for a lot longer than I have, and they've done a pretty good job, and as far as I know it, it's pretty competitive and it works really well. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'm gonna go test it. I'm going to Walmart.com right now. Actually no, I'll do it from the command line: `time curl https://walmart.com` |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[laughs\] He's actually doing it, too. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, I instantly get a `302`. What's the curl command to follow the redirect? |
**Chase Adams:** That's `-L`, is the flag I think you wanna use. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Minus which? |
**Chase Adams:** Minus L. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** L. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So while he's doing that, what's the size of the team, and was this written in a prior language or was it a new project from the ground-up written in Go? |
**Chase Adams:** Again, since I'm newer to the team, I don't have as much history about what it was written in before the acquisition, but I do know that there was at a point in time around 2012 there was a point where they were trying to decide whether or not to write the reverse proxy in Node or in Go, and clearly th... |
\[04:10\] As far as what I remember my manager telling me, it was around 0.8. So it's been written in Go for a very long time. They've built the whole company on Go, as far as I know. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's awesome. |
**Chase Adams:** It's a pretty neat thing to come into it for having started at 0.8, and now I think we're using 1.8... To be able to see that much of a transition is pretty neat. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Let's talk about hiring -- I know your team is small, because we talked about this, but I'm wondering... Every once in a while I ask people how their hiring is for Go developers - how you approach it at your company or in your team, if you have difficulties... |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, that's a good question. I am the newest person to the team, and before that I think the newest person was a year old. Our team is pretty small - there are three full-time developers writing Go, and we have a guy who's doing DevOps, and my manager is about 50/50 split. So our team's pretty small, ... |
As far as hiring goes, for me one of the interesting things was being able to be given a project to work on, and I work on that project as if it were a greenfield... And to think about a lot of the considerations for which features I should add or which features not to add, because it might move out my project's timeli... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So I wanted to start asking you about your stack as far as having distributed systems... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, that's a good question. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** ...and also - jumping ahead maybe, but also talking about distributed teams, because I know you work remote, and how that works... But one thing at a time, I guess. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Show us your stack! |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, so I can't talk too much about the stack except to say that we have a lot of executables running in different places, and they're all Go. For our stats, we're using [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/), but other than that, most everything's -- sorry, and [NSQ](https://nsq.io/) as well. So those ... |
But most everything is Go, and it's spread out across the world, which is pretty neat, since we support Asda, Walmart Brazil, Walmart Canada, Sam's Club, Walmart US, Walmart Mexico... I don't know, there's so many different properties that we support... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I've recently learned that there's a big developer team in Brazil; they actually have a dev team down there. I was pretty impressed. |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, it's pretty amazing how far-reaching Walmart is. I've talked to people on Slack from the U.K., and from Canada... I haven't talked to anyone from Brazil that, but I know that team is starting to transition to using the Edge platform tools that we have. It's pretty amazing how many people there ar... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[08:10\] Are you using [Docker](https://www.docker.com/), [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/), anything like that? |
**Chase Adams:** No. Pretty much everything is either on bare metal or NVMs, and since it's a stack, that built binary we don't have to really worry about too much other than that. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yay Go! |
**Chase Adams:** So no Docker... And since it scales as well as it does, we're not having to spin up a lot of new instances of our Edge services. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's really cool. Do you have any secrets you can share about what kind of traffic do you see through those Edge services? How many billions of requests per hour, or anything exciting like that? |
**Chase Adams:** It's a lot. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's an official number - it's a lot. |
**Chase Adams:** It's a lot. I don't know that I can grab any numbers real quick, but it's enough that it keeps me here, and it keeps me happy, which is -- really, one of the coolest things about being at Walmart is we're working at a pretty big scale with Go, and doing it in a way that our team is able to stay small a... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That is super cool. So is the team mostly distributed? |
**Chase Adams:** Our team is fully distributed. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.