Abstract
Baker is an open source Go program and a library, but it’s also a story. A story about programming, friendship, and having fun doing things the best you can, squeezing the code to the last CPU cycle.
Giovanni and Valentino met years ago, within the GCC and Python communities, before the first PyCon Italia. They rarely worked together, until the collaboration between the two companies of which they are now CTOs, respectively Develer and NextRoll, was born.
As it often happens, the technical debt grows inexorably in every infrastructure, but along with it also grows the awareness of the details of the problem, and the accuracy with which it is possible to estimate which are the solid choices and which are the risky ones.
There comes a time when there would be no room to rewrite something from scratch, but a little voice says it’s the right thing to do. So it’s time to experiment!
Baker is the fruit of this experiment: it’s a program written in Go, a library of components with which you can easily build high-performance Big Data pipelines, but it’s also a case study for anyone who has a complex infrastructure that’s creaking somewhere and is looking for a way to fix things without breaking everything.
