Migrating a large codebase to Node & ReactRyan Burgess@burgessdryan
What is your reaction to migrating to a new codebase?
Once the migration starts it can be daunting
It doesn’t need to be that frustrating
Software Engineer Manager at Netflix@burgessdryan
Why migrate to a new codebase? Why React & Node?
How did we tackle the migration at Netflix?
What lessons did we learn?
Why migrate to a new codebase?
The ability to innovate faster
Simplify & separate concerns
Developer productivity
Our UI team is familiar with JavaScript
Less context switching
Great tooling in the Node.js ecosystem
Allows for universal rendering of UI components
Makes development fasterand increases productivity
We use Restify at NetflixLightweight
Absolute control over interactions with HTTPAutomatic DTrace support
https://github.com/restify/node-restify
Why not any of these other frameworks?
React supports universal rendering
Performance / Virtual DOM
Unified our markup with corresponding view logic
Developer happiness
A solid community
How we tackled the migration at Netflix
Decouple design changes from architecture changes
Don’t try to migrate all at once, tackle in sections
Allows for flexibility and ability to learn
Allowed us to pivot
Before leveraging React we used Dust.js
https://github.com/linkedin/dustjs
Plan to support two codebases
Leverage metrics• Atlas metrics• A/B test metrics
Metric cyclePush to production
Check metricsInvestigate / Iterate
What lessons didwe learn?
Estimating a migration is hard
Choose a technology that works for you and your team
Migrate in sections, not all at once
Design changes can impactyour metrics
Use metrics whenever possible
Thank you!@burgessdryan