21–27 of 27 posts
Great people and company to work for, since then they've continued to grow massively and everyone I worked with then is now team/country/region lead.
Fingers crossed they're back up and running soon.
Apparently, Xero is an online accouting SaaS. Never heard of it before.
I'm in the UK and 100% of my clients and probably around 50% of the small business owners I meet at networking events use it. Xero being down is a big deal for a lot of people.
Apparently, Xero is an online accouting SaaS. Never heard of it before.
As an ex-Xero employee, I just had to blink twice seeing this trending on Hacker News. For context, Xero is primarily huge in New Zealand and Australia with a large UK chunk but not much presence in the US. While I shouldn't say too much, I'm sure the incident history speaks for itself that this isn't unheard of :) https://status.xero.com/history Arguably underreported I might think considering the userbase however
Can you shed any light on what the codebase is like? Using it feels like there are two seperate templating libraries and apps that are serving different routes. Is there any truth to this?
As background, Xero is in the same boat as a whole host of different businesses. It's nothing unique to them at all. They started with a single C# monolith and that scaled until it started running into trouble. At this point, you start splitting out your monolith into different services and Xero is quite a ways down that track.
At present, there's still a decent chunk of code that still lives in the original monolithic codebase. The initial home screen (dashboards etc) live in there among other things as an example.
When you navigate between services however (ie; invoicing or payroll), those are actually entirely different sites run by other teams that you're switching between, even though the UI is the same (the navigation bar is itself a separate service too for example which is why sometimes you get incidents where the nav bar disappears, if that service runs into trouble)
There is an in-house CSS library that is standard to keep everything consistent but there may still be older versions of it between services or even different JS libraries depending on how old or new a given service is.
So I guess to answer your question, the answer is yes, there are multiple templating libraries and things like that under the hood.
Beyond that, I probably shouldn't go into too much detail! Most of the above I think you can infer just by navigating around the application and seeing how various cookies, stylesheets and what not change so there's nothing particular unique.
Xero has about 60% of the SME market in Oz. Xero doesn’t let you export or backup your data. One Kiwi company does auto Xero backup (Control-C) but their interface is super clunky - I know they are trying to fix their stuff though but the backup service provided is for use in emergency only. Each time I see an outage at Xero, and they are getting more and more lately, my heart stops. I fear one day I’ll wake up and m…
What’s a backup going to do? It’s not as if a database backup would enable business to continue the next day. For a data model the size of Xero, the logic of the application is inherently tied to the data.