JC Fant IV
Oct-5th-2021

History

Over the course of the last 21 years I’ve spent time in nearly every aspect of the technical stack, however, I’ve always been drawn to the frontend as the best place to be able to impact customers. I’ve enjoyed the rapid iterations, and the ability to visualize those changes in the browser. It’s why I  spent much of the last 14 years prior to Eventbrite at Amazon (AWS) evangelizing the frontend stack. That passion led me to co-found one of the largest conferences internally to Amazon reaching over 7500 engineers across 6 continents. The conference is focused on all aspects of the Frontend, and helped to highlight technologies that teams could adopt and leverage to solve customer problems.

In March of 2021 I joined Eventbrite to help solve some of those same challenges that I’ve spent much of my career trying to solve. As part of my onboarding I was asked to ramp up on the current problem space and the technical challenges the company faces, and to dive into the issues impacting many of our frontend developers and designers. With all of that knowledge, I was tasked to come up with a 3 Year Frontend Strategy. 

Many of you have already read the first 3 posts in this series, Creating our 3 year technical vision, Writing our 3 year technical vision, and Writing our Golden Path. If you haven’t had a chance, those 3 posts help to set the context for how we defined and delivered our 3 year Frontend Strategy.

Current Challenges and Limitations

In those previous posts, Vivek Sagi and Daniel Micol described many of the problems that backend engineers, and engineers in general face at Eventbrite. My first task was to engage and listen to the Frontend Engineers around the company and to identify more specific frontend challenges and limitations that we face every day.

• A monolithic architecture leads to teams having unnecessary dependencies and being forced to move at the speed of the monolith. They are often blocked by other changes or the release schedule of the monolith.
• Our performance is suboptimal leading to some poor customer interfaces and low lighthouse scores. 
• We lack automation in how we test, deploy, monitor and roll back our frontend code.
• Our frontends are currently written in both a legacy framework and a more modern framework where the rendering patterns have diverged, and are no longer swappable without a migration. 
• Service or datastore performance issues have a high blast radius where  all aspects of the site are degraded including pages that are static in nature.
• Our front end experiences are inconsistent across our product portfolio and making changes to deliver against our 3-year self service strategy requires too much coordination.

Developing Requirements

Now that we had a decent understanding of the issues we’ve been facing, we turned our attention to understanding the requirements to solve these problems. 

1. Features. As our product offering evolves to deliver high quality self-service experiences for creators and attendees, we ensure that our technology stack enables teams to efficiently create, optimize, and maintain the net new functionality we provide. 
2. Performance. User perception of our product’s performance is paramount: a slow product is a poor product that impacts our customers’ trust. 
3. Search Engine Optimized. Through page speed, optimized content, and an improved User Experience, our frontends must employ the proper techniques to maintain or increase our SEO.
4. Scale. Our frontends must out-scale our traffic, absorbing load spikes when necessary, and deliver a consistent customer experience.  
5. Resilient. Our frontends will respond to customer requests, regardless of the status of downstream services. 
6. Accessible. Our frontends will be developed to ensure equal access and opportunity to everyone with a diverse set of abilities.
7. Quality.  The quality of our experiences should be prioritized to deliver customer value, solve customer problems, and be at a level of performance that meets our SLA’s and reduces customer reported bugs. 

Defining Our Tenets

We set out to define a core set of tenets for this strategy; a core set of principles designed to guide our decision making. These tenets help us to align the vision and decisions against our end goals. I wanted these tenets to be focused on driving the solution to be something that Frontend Engineers want to adopt, not something they must. We need to deliver something that is seductive, makes engineers’ lives better, and in turn is able to directly impact our customers; as engineers are able to move quicker, and have the autonomy and ownership to make decisions.

1. Developer Experience. Start with the developer and work backwards. Tools and frameworks must enable rapid development. Developing inside the Frontend Strategy must be easy and fast, with limited friction.
2. Metric Driven. We make decisions through the use of metrics; measuring how our pages and components behave and their latencies to drive changes.
3. Ownership. Teams control their own destiny from end-to-end. From the infrastructure to the software development lifecycle (SDLC), owning the full stack leads to better customer focus, team productivity, and higher quality code.
4. No Obstacles. We remove gatekeepers from the process by providing self-service options, reusable templates, and tooling.
5. Features Over Infrastructure. We leverage solutions that unlock frontend engineer productivity, in order to focus on customer features rather than maintaining our infrastructure. 
6. Pace of Innovation. We build solutions to obstacles that interfere with getting features in front of customers.
7. Every Briteling. We build tools and leverage technology that allows every Briteling to build customer facing features. 

Developing Our Vision

Now that we had the challenges, requirements and tenets outlined, we needed to define a vision for this 3 year frontend strategy. Following the tenets, we want to empower Britelings to deliver customer impactful features, and make our customers lives better. We want this vision to be something everyone in the company can get behind, and as such we don’t actually reference Frontend Engineers, instead we strive to empower ALL Britelings to deliver customer impactful experiences.

Vision

Delight creators and attendees by empowering Britelings to easily design, build, and deliver best in class user experiences. 

Next Post we will talk about the Strategy and the architecture.