Presentation on Sunday at 2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. in Room 1130.
Almost every software project of meaningful scale eventually runs into architectural problems. One of the larger issues we’ve dealt with at Twilio is an increasingly-brittle and hard-to-manage PHP codebase, originally responsible for running a website and public REST API. Over time, core business logic has been extracted from the legacy codebase into internal services fronted by a public REST API. This talk will explore how Python and Flask were used to build a simple proxying HTTP layer to handle all of Twilio’s API traffic and direct it to the appropriate internal systems. Along the way, we’ll cover why Python is well-suited to this application, ways to test code that’s replacing existing services, deployment strategies, and all of the benefits that came from migrating to more modern systems.
Sam Kitajima-Kimbrel is a Python enthusiast of four years who also enjoys cycling, cooking, and science fiction. He is currently working on distributed data storage systems for Twilio, having spent the past two years focused on maintaining and scaling the Twilio REST API. Sam resides in Berkeley, California with his husband Kameron and their dog Basil.