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**Johnny Boursiquot:** What does an environment like this look like for a junior developer? If you're looking to make impact within this system, which on its face seems very intimidating if you're not familiar with any such process - so maybe you're out of school, maybe you've only spent a couple of years in industry..... |
**Nishant Roy:** Yeah, so having been there myself, one thing that worked really well for me, and I encourage a lot of folks do this within Pinterest and other companies, is the biggest opportunity you have for understanding gaps in the system, whether that's performance-related or stability-related especially, are inc... |
I about six months ago saw an incident on the ad side that I remember happening 4,5 years ago, when I had been here only like six or seven months. When I saw some of those metrics, it just sort of jogged my memory, like, "Hey, this happened a long time ago, but it happened before. Let me just go in and see what we did ... |
So I've seen that work for several folks who are new to the company. It's like "Hey, I saw this happen two weeks ago. Here's what Nishant did to fix it that time. Let's try this again." And then suddenly, you're the hero that saved the day. And even if that's not necessarily what happens, as part of the follow-ups, tak... |
So I'd say that's probably one of the easiest ways... If you have absolutely no knowledge of a system, just get into these rooms with people who are discussing everything about the system, and hypothesizing about all the reasons why something might break. It's just one of the quickest ways to learn a lot about differen... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** And if you have a suggestion, big or small, do you usually pair up with somebody more senior, who can help you through the vetting process? |
**Nishant Roy:** Yeah, so for my team, and I think a lot of teams at Pinterest usually, everyone new especially is assigned an onboarding mentor, who's typically the more senior person on the team. So that's usually a good sounding board to start with, like "Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?" |
For my team specifically, we have a bi-weekly team meeting where essentially for 20 minutes every two weeks everyone is encouraged to -- there's other parts to that meeting, it's an hour-long meeting, but in these 20 minutes, it's like open floor, just share anything that you've found interesting, any problem that you ... |
One example for me early on was understanding how the RPC library in Go works, for instance. It's a little bit of magic how those functions get registered... So bringing those questions up and giving people the opportunity to get answers to those questions, and just bringing up those suggestions and how they can improv... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Awesome. Jon, have you got anything before we switch it over to unpopular opinions? Because Nishant said he brought the heat, so I'm looking for it... \[laughs\] |
**Jon Calhoun:** Nothing else comes to mind. I'm ready to hear this unpopular opinion. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Nice, nice. |
**Jingle:** \[44:08\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Alright, let's hear it, Nishant. |
**Nishant Roy:** This might actually be a really popular opinion for this pod... But my unpopular opinion is that working with non-typed languages, non-compiled languages can be a nightmare, especially as your codebase grows extremely large. I will say, shout-out to the Pinterest team. I think they've done a fantastic ... |
I know for a fact that one of my friends in the past who worked at Pinterest introduced one bug where they accidentally reused a variable that was defined elsewhere, overwrote that variable's name, because this file was like 900 lines long, and Python didn't throw up any flags for using this variable, like Go would... ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Good. Jon, what do you think? |
**Jon Calhoun:** I mean, I feel like what he's saying has a lot of truth. What makes those languages great at small scale also makes them challenging at large scale. But I would assume most people getting into those things kind of understand those trade-offs... But I don't know, maybe some people completely disagree. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** My opinion is that there's always going to be somebody who is of a different opinion... But I think opinions, and perhaps - well, this is not an unpopular opinion, but I think opinions should be allowed to change over time. Right? Once upon a time, I was a die-hard statically-typed language perso... |
So I think it's okay to swing back and forth, but I think the better approach, which I think is harder than most people give it credit, is to have a measured approach to how you make decisions about things, to how you judge things to be nor good or bad. There's no such thing as absolutely good, or absolutely bad. You k... |
So today I might use dynamic typing because I'm able to move a little faster, because maybe I'm building a prototype, maybe I'm building something that doesn't need to be statically-typed for reason X, Y, and Z, and you know what the decision is... Which is why I love decision records, right? Including why you pick a f... |
\[48:06\] The disservice we do ourselves is by basically being fanatics of one thing. And I know sometimes I myself sound like a Go fanatic... Because I love Go. I do it every day. It's my favorite language. Hopefully, I'll be writing Go into my retirement. But I know that Go is not always the right tool for the job, s... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I mean, I can definitely agree with that... There's always trade-offs with all that stuff. It's also interesting -- as Nishant was talking about it, I guess, I was also thinking about the fact that depending on when you join a project, I think it can sometimes skew your opinion of whether something's m... |
**Nishant Roy:** Right. And it's so dependent on the stage that you're at... Because tomorrow if I was starting a company, needed to hire five folks, how easy or hard would it be for me to find five great Go developers, versus five great Python developers? It's just night and day. I know I could find five Python develo... |
The question then becomes "Is there ever a right stage for a company going from 10 engineers to 100 engineers to 1000 engineers - when and if do you decide to go from Python to Java, to Go, to C++, whatever that is? And is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea?" I don't think there's enough data that exists in the indus... |
There's a couple of pieces floating around around rewrites essentially not being the best idea in the world always, but I've seen cases where rewrites have actually paid off tremendously. I think Snap rewriting their Android app was one example, where it was a tremendous win for them. So it's very dependent, you're rig... |
**Jon Calhoun:** It kind of reminds me of the discussion around like microservices or anything like that, when people are like "Is it the right time to switch to them?" And you'll see a million stories online about how it was successful, and other stories where it's like "It was the biggest problem we've ever had becau... |
**Nishant Roy:** Yup. |
**Jon Calhoun:** But if you are starting a new company, I guarantee you can find 10 people who want to learn Go. They might not be experts in it. |
**Nishant Roy:** That's true. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** That is true. That is true. Yeah, I think that is way more likely than to find actually fully-grown, so to speak, Go developers. That's true. That's true. Jon, did you bring an unpop? |
**Jon Calhoun:** I did not. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Fine... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I'm too depressed with the snow outside... \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Maybe that is your unpop. There shouldn't be snow at this time of year for you. |
**Jon Calhoun:** There really shouldn't be snow at this time of the year. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. Come on. |
**Nishant Roy:** It's a little early... |
**Jon Calhoun:** My wife now wants to get Christmas decorations out, there's snow outside... It's really hard to say no. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Right, right, right... |
**Nishant Roy:** It's basically Christmas once it starts snowing, right? That's how it works? |
**Jon Calhoun:** Sort of... Honestly, the biggest reason why I say no right now is because I'm like "I'm too busy right now." After Thanksgiving it usually dies down a little bit for me, so I'm like "Then I can help with Christmas stuff if you need." I'm not trying to ruin the party. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** This was a very nice episode. Thank you, Nishant, for coming and talking about the kinds of things you're working on over at Pinterest, and the challenges the team has experienced, and your role in it... I wish you continued success and growth in your endeavor. It was awesome having you. |
And Jon, thank you so much for being my co-host last-minute, always good having you. With that, we will say goodbye to the internet, and listener, we will catch you on the next one. |
• Defining legacy code and identifying its characteristics |
• Factors contributing to legacy code (age, tooling, maintenance difficulty) |
• When Go applications become considered legacy |
• Identifying dependencies as legacy and strategies for dealing with them (caching, latency optimization) |
• Challenges of maintaining legacy code from a technical and personal perspective |
• Legacy code and its impact on software development |
• Good vs bad legacy: distinction between maintainable and unmaintainable codebases |
• Code testing and coverage thresholds as a means to mitigate legacy issues |
• Go language features and their potential benefits in reducing legacy code |
• Backward compatibility, tooling, and the role of language design in maintaining codebases over time |
• Tooling and platform limitations as major pain points in legacy software maintenance |
• Difficulty in upgrading Java and .NET due to backwards compatibility issues and massive ecosystem dependencies |
• Go's advantage in ease of upgrade due to minimal dependencies and open-source nature |
• Importance of community involvement and alignment between business, product, and engineering requirements for successful legacy code refactoring or rewriting |
• Criteria for determining when a complete rewrite is necessary, including maintenance costs, technological advancements, and business needs |
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