Jean Barmash on Inter-Service RPC with gRPC/Thrift, Designing Public APIs, & Lean/Constraint Theory

Jean Barmash is Director of Engineering at Compass, Founder & Co-Organizer, NYC CTO School Meetup. Live in New York City. He has over 15 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 4 startups over the last seven years, 3 as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded. Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a variety of progressively senior roles in development, integration consulting, training, and team leadership. He worked for such companies as Trilogy, Symantec, Infusion and Alfresco, consulting to Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, Adobe, IHG, Citi, BofA, NBC, and Booz Allen Hamilton. Jean will speak at QCon New York 2017: http://bit.ly/2nN7KKo Why listen to this podcast: - The Compass backend is mostly written in Java and Python, with Go increasingly a first class language. The main reason for Go being added was developer productivity. - The app is based on a Microservices architecture with around 40-50 services in total. - Binary RPC, originally Thrift and Finagle, is used as the communication protocol, but the company is gradually moving to gRPC still with Thrift. One advantage that gRPC offers is better Python support than Finagle. - The company has built a code generation framework which takes Thrift and converts it to a RESTful API for clients to consume. - Constraint theory is about how you manage the one constraint in a system or team that prevent you increasing throughput; for example if your software engineering team only has one front end engineer do you ask back-end engineers to pick off some front-end tasks, or bring in a contractor. Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq