Design

Succession: A Refactoring Story

What is the focus of your work today?

At GitHub, we have a GraphQL and a REST API. I focus on the REST API (we have about 550 public API endpoints in the REST API and that keeps growing). Most of my team works on the GraphQL side of things. I mainly work on the guts of the API - the plumbing, performance, and consistency. Much of my work is around things like code reviews and making sure that we don't break backward compatibility (even when we wish we could).

What’s the tech stack that’s powering it?

Most of GitHub is running on Ruby on Rails. The entire API is a Sinatra app that's mounted inside of rails. It's probably 8 or 9 years old at this point. The newer code at GitHub includes Haskell, Go, and Python. We probably have some Java in the data science side of things. We also run a ton of JavaScript with Electron and Atom.