2023 W20 - Shipping Fast & Slow

Humberto

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

Last week we shipped an amazing improvement to our Integrations service. It was too slow, and now it's *too fast*.

The upgrade implemented an unprecedented level of parallelism within Integrations tasks. That is, it allows us to execute a much larger number of requests to 3rd party APIs simultaneously, without breaking any precedent-dependent logic.

(Once again, we have our amazing team to thank for this.)

This change is very important, as our users have been using Integrations more and more, with *millions of executions* every week.

BigQuery
Google Analytics
OpenAI
etc.

Well, now Integration executions are so fast that we're constantly running up to per-user rate-limits on Integrations.

We have already implemented throttling per Integration, and users were sharing that bandwidth.. but with the increased speed we will have to implement per user throttling, or more specifically, it'll probably be per user-account throttling, plus back-off strategies and other things.

Too much speed isn't just a technical occurrence; it's also an organizational one. Example: Since Q4 2022 our feature development has sped up. On a few occasions we were shipping so many things almost simultaneously that we had to pause a bit to see where releases intercepted - it happened for example when we were in the window to release the New Grid, Data Tables, and the Rows API.

Still, too much speed is a good problem to have, and one that can be solved.

See you next week!