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Brian McCallister, CTO of Platform at Groupon

Brian McCallister

Biography: Brian McCallister

Brian McCallister joined Groupon as CTO of Platform in 2013. Prior to Groupon, he was Principal Architect and Distinguished Engineer at Ning, where he was responsible for directing and communicating the technical big picture across the organization. He joined Ning originally as a Core Architect when it was a tiny startup and watched it grow to over two hundred people. At the Apache Software Foundation, Brian has served on the Board of Directors and as PMC Chairs for the DB and ActiveMQ projects. Within the ASF he has focused on pushing for greater project autonomy, and mentoring and shepherding a number of projects into the foundation, including Cassandra, Mesos, and Jclouds.

In his broader past, Brian has worked variously as a programmer, engineering manager, technical writer, and systems administrator on projects ranging from internet platforms to loom control drivers. He is also a great mentor, and takes a vested interest in developing other engineers to help turn them into great engineers. Brian holds an MS in Education and BA in English both from Bucknell University.

Twitter: @brianm

Presentation: I-Tier: Breaking Up the Monolith

Track: Building Integrated Applications with Web Technologies / Time: Thursday 15:40 - 16:30 / Location: Fleming

Groupon recently completed a year-long project to migrate its U.S. web traffic from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a new multi-application stack with substantial results.

Groupon's entire U.S. web frontend had been a single Rails codebase from its inception in 2008. The frontend codebase quickly grew large, which made it difficult to maintain and challenging to ship new features. As a solution to this gigantic monolith, we decided to re-architect the frontend by splitting it into small, independent and more manageable pieces which we integrated into a cohesive whole. At the center of this project, we rebuilt each major section of the website as an independent application. We also rebuilt the infrastructure to make all the independent apps work together. Interaction Tier (I-Tier) was the result.

Learn the strategies, techniques, and tools used to peel apart a monolithic application, and then integrate dozens of smaller applications into a cohesive, faster to run, faster evolve, and easier to maintain whole!