By Eric Saxby

While there are resources on why other companies have made the transition to SOA, and end-game service boundaries may be clear, there are few resources on how to make progress towards SOA without sinking an entire team or stopping concurrent product development. Faced with a growing codebase, slower tests and performance issues, we've extracted services from our large Rails app the way we do everything else: iteratively. I'll walk through what we did right, and what we almost did wrong.

It took a while for Eric to come around to programming, trying a few other careers first. Now he focuses on the intersection of code and process, using buzzwords such as TDD, agile and devops to describe his ham-fisted hammering on keyboards. He finds it most interesting when code fails, and why.