Making Meetup

Futurizing Meetup

We believe in constantly futurizing Meetup, so we’ve been spending a lot of time prototyping, learning, and making as we move towards Rainbows & Unicorns and making Meetup even better. We hope that by sharing what we’re learning along the way, it helps other engineering teams positively change their company too.

Selecting the right tool for the job is core to our engineering culture. There are five big areas we’ve been focusing on so far, and with each one we’ve been building a little piece of Meetup product as the key part of our assessment.

Build, test, launch, test, build…

We’re rebuilding the backbone of Meetup – our continuous delivery pipeline. We decided that in order to empower our engineers with the tools and infrastructure we have boldly envisioned, we’d need to use a new set of CI and automation tools and frameworks. We’re currently using Jenkins which has served us well, but really like what we’re seeing with Bamboo as a complete CI pipeline tool with very high quality plugins and orchestration hooks.

We’re reassessing our testing frameworks across our core, web, and mobile platforms so that we have a stronger suite of unit/integration/UI/regression tests with even more coverage.  So far we’ve been really enjoying using Selenium, Appium for our native apps, and the Robot framework for acceptance testing.

Moving Meetup to the cloud

We’re a (mostly) bare metal shop with multiple data centers now. We’re ready to take advantage of the benefits of moving to the cloud including auto-scaling, the ability to create phoenix systems with instances automatically rising out of ones that have crashed and burned, and reducing operational effort and total cost of ownership. 

Our infrastructure team has been building our new continuous delivery pipeline and other tools on both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform and we’re close to making a decisions as to which cloud provider we’re selecting.

A world full of services

Our core engineering team is breaking up our monolithic back-end platform into a service-oriented one.  We’re not yet sure how “micro-service” we’ll get since we’re still figuring out how bounded contexts apply to Meetup product, where the seams really are in our codebase, and what parts of our monolith need to scale in bigger or different ways than the others.

We’re very excited to start on the path to learning and making decisions by building our first new service using part of the Netflix OSS stack. We did initial prototyping using Twitter’s Finagle and Typesafe’s Reactive Platform as well, and they’re all great stacks. But we’ve decided on the Netflix OSS and are starting off using Hystrix, RxJava, RxScala, and RxNetty to build our first service.

Data is king

Meetup has happily used MySQL as our primary data store for over a decade. Over the years we’ve added things like Hadoop for distributed computing and Redshift for data warehousing. We’re at the right time in our growth to evaluate if other data store options will enable us to scale and perform better. We did a lot of research and prototyping with SQL, NoSQL, and distributed NoSQL data stores, and were inspired by the idea of turning the database inside-out.

We decided that we’d learn the most valuable information if we built our first new service using a NoSQL distributed data store like Apache Cassandra, Amazon Dynamo, or Google Cloud Datastore, which we’re internally calling Cassandra* for short. Our decision on which one to use will align with our impending our cloud provider decision and until then we’re prototyping using Meetupy data with each.  

React or not here we come

Our web engineering team has been prototyping both Ember and React by building a small part of Meetup web product with each. After that was done, and a lot of debate throughout the whole team, we’ve decided on React as our new JavaScript web framework.  

We’re super excited to be building an isomorphic JavaScript web stack to facilitate iterating web product in a faster and more productive way. We especially like the React ecosystem, separation of concerns, and preference for small, sharp tools.

Futurize Meetup with us

While we’ve answered many questions, we still have a long way to go.  We’re thrilled to work at a company where we have the time to prototype different technologies and build towards the best answers for both current and future Meetup product. As we progress, we’ll be writing posts that dive into the specifics of what we’re learning, the tools, technologies, and frameworks we’re using, and how they’re working for us.

If you want to build the future of Meetup with us, learn and experiment with new technologies, or have ideas to share, check out ways to join our team.