Refactoring half the business: How we outgrew a janky script at a fast-growing startup
Summary
A startup engineering war story about refactoring a critical but poorly-built script at Plasmidsaurus (a fast-growing biotech startup). The author describes how a simple script that handled customer orders grew into a fragile, untestable monolith as the business scaled from $20M to a projected $100M in revenue. The piece details the technical debt, the decision to refactor half the business logic, and the engineering challenges of rebuilding a system while keeping it running — all framed around the classic startup pattern of outgrowing a quick-and-dirty solution.
Source
SidebarRefactoring half the business: How we outgrew a janky script at a fast-growing startupswizec.comKey quotes
· 4 pulledSomeone had built a leaky rowboat. It worked! Then we started flying the rowboat as a Cessna. What we needed was an aircraft carrier.
I joined in August 2024 and it felt like jumping on a galloping unicorn.
Code is the easy part. The hard part is understanding the business, the domain, and the people.
Timezones are pretty easy, honestly. They're just the first time many of us deal with arbitrary capricious business rules.
You might also wanna read
AI coding agents are flooding open source repos with low-quality pull requests, data from OpenClaw shows
An analysis of pull request data from the OpenClaw repository on GitHub, which became the fastest-growing repo in history. The article exami
greptile.com·12d ago
Startup's Early Backend Migration: From Python to Node.js One Week After Launch
A startup shares their experience of completely rewriting their backend from Python to Node.js just one week after launch, despite conventio
The Persistent Cycle of Attempting to Replace Software Developers
The article examines the recurring pattern in the software industry where every decade brings new promises to simplify development and reduc
caimito.net·5mo ago
Examining AI Coding's Bubble Dynamics: SDD, Valuation Concerns, and the Reality of Automation Claims
The article examines the AI coding revolution and questions whether it represents a bubble, focusing on Specification-Driven Development (SD
hyperdev.matsuoka.com·8mo ago
Why Refactoring Should Not Be on the Backlog: Continuous Code Improvement
Ron Jeffries argues against putting refactoring stories on the product backlog, explaining that refactoring should be done continuously as p
ronjeffries.com·6mo ago
How AI Will Transform Biopharma: The Sequence of Change Matters
Ben Liu, CEO of Formation Bio, argues that AI will transform the pharmaceutical industry unevenly and sequentially. Some parts of drug disco
a16z.news·15d ago
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
No comments yet. Be the first.