WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com • Hacker News Board

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#61

Post by dingdingdang » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:12 AM UTC

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #56

tluyben2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is great that this happened and I applaud open source contributions, especially by bigger companies, I wonder what the reasons for such a rewrite were. And why the online platform manager approved it. People often try to convince me of shiny-new-thing-39432 and sometimes we try on a non-risk project and usually we find out it's the same or (more often) worse than what we used before. I like React and theo…

Great question, we definitely took a hard look on if we should transform our tech stack or not (and decided to do it) - to really answer this question though, you would need to understand our previous stack, what was holding us back, and where we wanted to go. I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not :).

I believe it would be an interesting blog post - the amount of sheer "yeah we need xyz tech for more oomph" decisions made within business sector by managers who are not truly capable of judging the implications of said tech is quite something.

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#62

Post by dingdingdang » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:12 AM UTC

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #56

tluyben2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is great that this happened and I applaud open source contributions, especially by bigger companies, I wonder what the reasons for such a rewrite were. And why the online platform manager approved it. People often try to convince me of shiny-new-thing-39432 and sometimes we try on a non-risk project and usually we find out it's the same or (more often) worse than what we used before. I like React and theo…

Great question, we definitely took a hard look on if we should transform our tech stack or not (and decided to do it) - to really answer this question though, you would need to understand our previous stack, what was holding us back, and where we wanted to go. I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not :).

I believe it would be an interesting blog post - the amount of sheer "yeah we need xyz tech for more oomph" decisions made within business sector by managers who are not truly capable of judging the implications of said tech is quite something.

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#63

Post by micaksica » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:21 AM UTC

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #56

tluyben2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is great that this happened and I applaud open source contributions, especially by bigger companies, I wonder what the reasons for such a rewrite were. And why the online platform manager approved it. People often try to convince me of shiny-new-thing-39432 and sometimes we try on a non-risk project and usually we find out it's the same or (more often) worse than what we used before. I like React and theo…

Great question, we definitely took a hard look on if we should transform our tech stack or not (and decided to do it) - to really answer this question though, you would need to understand our previous stack, what was holding us back, and where we wanted to go. I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not :).

> I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not.

It definitely is. There is a serious business cost to front end trendiness, so it's good to hear the legitimate business cases for these switches vs. "it's what the devs want to code on."

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#64

Post by alexgrigoryan » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:26 AM UTC

heroprotagonist wrote: post #28

This is somewhat surprising, in a good way. A lot of large companies are pretty risk averse, and this prevents them from releasing the source for their shopping platforms into the wild. I'm sure there are some differences between the open source version and what they actually run. Is this the complete platform? What's held back? I would think the analytic tools for usage and sales, how they store user data, and perha…

Electrode is just the front end platform. We also have OneOps for our app server lifecycle management. Test Armada for automation.

I don't know of anything lower in the stack that was open sourced than what I mentioned.

The stuff we didn't put into the Electrode platform that is integrated internally, off the top of my head:

1. Integrations to our global config manager, that allows us to turn flags on/off in real time.

2. Integrations to our A/B Testing Tools

3. Integrations to our content management

4. Logging/Analytics/Metrics Integrations

5. Our CSS styles and Icons

As you can see, almost everything is open sourced :)

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#65

Post by alexgrigoryan » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:30 AM UTC

Negative1 wrote: post #36

Curious; is this stuff being developed at the location out in San Bruno (in front of Youtube)?

The Application Platform team (folks who created Electrode) is mostly based in the Sunnyvale office.

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#66

Post by doug1001 » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:31 AM UTC

parthdesai wrote: post #31

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #19

My blog post that talks more about the release: https://medium.com/walmartlabs/introducing-electrode-an-open...

Hey Alex, I have a quick unrelated question. Why is Walmart.ca contracted outside if you have walmart labs? Well at least the front-end. Hope it's okay to ask you that.

i believe i had read in a medium blog post that the .ca backend was build on akka/scala

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#67

Post by cygned » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:31 AM UTC

kevan wrote: post #2

Clarifying because I was confused at first: this is the React/Node.js tech stack that the website is built on, not the ecommerce platform that drives it.

Yeah, I was hoping to see some very cool Clojure code.

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#68

Post by alexgrigoryan » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:33 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #29

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you like it! I personally think that the above the fold content, server side caching, and redux-router-engine will make a positive impact on the server side rendering react community. We saw HUGE gains in performance using these. We are working on a blog post that goes through the performance numbers we saw on the live site. I also think Electrode Explorer will be popular for bigger companies that have many co…

Thanks for the reply, yeah, from what I've read and seen so far it definitely looks interesting... And seems to resolve a lot of the issues I had very early on with ismorphic^wuniversal rendering back when Yahoo's fluxible app had just come out. The render caching seems very cool as well, making up for the general double-render for fetching data triggered from the component. Right now at the day job I'm stuck in angu…

Your contact information is in your HN profile, I'll have our recruiters ping you with the opportunities we have available @WalmartLabs.

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#69

Post by alexgrigoryan » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:34 AM UTC

marccantwell wrote: post #58

exogen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic given that your comment is the most vapid in this entire thread.

Completely valid. I should have been more direct, but that wasn't the intent. Since you took the bait, I take issue with the seemingly flipant manner in which words are assigned new meanings, and existing concepts are relabeled. While the concept of archetypes is intellectually really fun to consider, it makes more difficult the ultimate project of speaking a common tongue. This is not an orthodox point of view, this…

Happy to receive feedback, do you have suggestions on what we should call it?

Re: WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

#70

Post by alexgrigoryan » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 8:39 AM UTC

osipov wrote: post #33

alexgrigoryan wrote: post #19

My blog post that talks more about the release: https://medium.com/walmartlabs/introducing-electrode-an-open...

Hi Alex. This follows on another announcement from Walmart around OneOps: https://github.com/oneops However I don't see these projects getting any sizable traction from the open source community. What's the point of releasing them if WalmartLabs isn't putting any investment into marketing to developers in order to get these projects to grow in adoption?

Thank you for the question.

I think that WalmartLabs is investing in OneOps and investing into marketing it to developers. I know our OneOps folks have been at the OpenStack conferences recently and are doing their best to engage with the community.

Regarding Electrode, we will do our best to market to developers and grow adoption. I'll be at multiple conferences in the coming months, have talked in meet ups, writing blog posts to go more in-depth. I'm not in marketing or PR though, so any tips are always appreciated :).