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Comment by gedy | Hacker News Reader

This was originally from Walmart Labs, no? Anyone know why they stopped being the corporate sponsor?

Most of the devs quit WalmartLabs a long time ago (including myself, Eran, etc). Sponsored in the sense that WalmartLabs paid us to use it to build their services and we developed hapi.js/joi to support our jobs.

I'm genuinely curious if anything produced by Walmart Labs had any sort of "commercial" success or was even adopted within the main Walmart ecosystem. I've certainly heard of hapi, but don't know if it ever gained all that much adoption. Or was it mostly a recruiting tool to make Walmart attractive to a better class of devs?

While I was there, hapi.js was extensively used by the Global eCommerce department and was responsible for fronting the entire mobile API. You can check Eran's blog for stories of how it handled all of Walmart's mobile API traffic especially during the massive thundering herd of Black Friday traffic. It was used on many other projects including some "big name" projects, however, I don't know if hapi's involvement was made public for those so can't name them directly.

Thanks for update and nice work for the community. I didn't end up taking job at WL, but Hapi greatly increased my technical opinion of them and was valuable for recruiting devs too.

Eran left Walmart, and Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who were co-heading Walmart Labs engineering (under the CTO) left shortly after to go back to Google. A new crew came in from PayPal, and they stripped all support of Hapi. They later created a heavy sludgey framework on top of it called Electrode for internal use and in slides did not even acknowledge it was Hapi underneath.

I say this as someone who took over a good chunk of Eran's world when he left Walmart, and I was more or less forced to have my team, some of whom were spending most of their time working on Hapi.js, work on "real" stuff.

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