[pdimitar]

I can easily turn your argument exactly in the opposite direction:

Since there's always huge conservatism in relation to rewriting or making in-house frameworks then there's a confirmation bias in these stories: "whew, we dodged a bullet by not even trying thing X".

Yeah, everyone could have said that.

I've attended and participated in at least 7 successful rewrites. You don't hear about them though because people read HN and are like "I am not willing to engage with biased people so let's keep it to ourselves".

That's an aspect of these conversations that a lot of people around here don't account for: the people who get stuff done are quiet. This should be included in analyses but often isn't.

---

...And finally, millions of code in a monolith isn't that scary. Find a part that has minimal dependencies to everything else, rewrite it, put a reverse proxy in front of your service that points a particular endpoint to the new code, test for a bit, done. Rinse and repeat. The process itself is trivial, not especially creative, and mostly just laborious than anything else.

[weatherlite]

I've attended and participated in rewrites that were catastrophic. To each his own experience.

I do trust that Shopify know what they're doing, we're gonna agree to disagree here.

[pdimitar]

Sure, I have no problem agreeing to disagree. :)

I feel obliged to point out that "I trust that $BIG_COMPANY knows what they are doing" is very often in reality "There are gatekeepers inside the tech teams that are custodians of tradition". Been in plenty of companies and that's often the non-romantic truth.

I'd just end this by saying that a lot of teams don't make their calls in such a scientific and objective manner as you seem to imply. I wish that was the case but it's not what I've seen. Bad luck or me sucking at picking employers, I suppose.