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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Given Walmart's deep contributions and investments in the Backbone ecosystem [0], which were impressive in their own right, I'm even more impressed that they seem to have switched to a React-based front end stack in a few years. That seems pretty agile for a company the size of Walmart.

[0] https://github.com/walmartlabs/thorax

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The switch of creating this platform, changing the walmart.com tech stack, and open sourcing it is less than a year :). Has been a wild ride!

Although it is great that this happened and I applaud open source contributions, especially by bigger companies, I wonder what the reasons for such a rewrite were. And why the online platform manager approved it. People often try to convince me of shiny-new-thing-39432 and sometimes we try on a non-risk project and usually we find out it's the same or (more often) worse than what we used before. I like React and theoretically (not practically unfortunately) also Node but if I already have a site built in something else the web team would have to come up with really over the top reasons (and prove them after the roll out!) to just dump that investment.

Probably a total redesign.

In fact design-wise, the React-powered site is identical to the previous one.

Great question, we definitely took a hard look on if we should transform our tech stack or not (and decided to do it) - to really answer this question though, you would need to understand our previous stack, what was holding us back, and where we wanted to go. I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not :).

I believe it would be an interesting blog post - the amount of sheer "yeah we need xyz tech for more oomph" decisions made within business sector by managers who are not truly capable of judging the implications of said tech is quite something.

> I'm not sure if reading about our previous stack and why we moved is an interesting blog post or not.

It definitely is. There is a serious business cost to front end trendiness, so it's good to hear the legitimate business cases for these switches vs. "it's what the devs want to code on."

Well I think a blogpost like that would shine a light on this kind of issue from one of the bigger companies in the world. It will be good for the image as well as most believe companies like Walmart are a big layer of stodge, like many other enterprise, where MBA CIO's say no to everything and when you finally get approval, the Oracle head DBA makes sure it will not work anyway.

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