Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails

At the start of 2007, we began a project to re-implement the entire YELLOWPAGES.COM site in a more agile technology with a new consumer-friendly site design. After about three months of research and nearly 4 months of development, we launched a new Rails-based site on June 28, 2007.

In this session, we’ll outline key points we think were critical to our success in avoiding the common “Big Rewrite” pitfalls:

• Defining a stable target
• Building an effective team
• Making timely decisions
• Planning to get everything done

We’ll also discuss our architectural goals and requirements, and how we designed and built our site for performance and scaling:

• Our basic architectural design
• Platform determination
• Avoiding pitfalls which make scaling difficult
• Optimizing for performance
• Estimating capacity
• Tuning
• What we’ve done since launch