I joined the Edge Foundation team @WalmartLabs about a year ago. We help manage the HTTP ingress flow (CDNs, WAF, Tier 1/2 proxies and LBs, etc) for all Walmart eCommerce properties. Our custom proxy also does some basic and not so basic frontend optimizations (js and css compression/minification/bundling, image resizing, url rewrites, etc) and handles a large portion of routing requests to backend servers.
This is a great write up from earlier this year, and from the screenshots it looks like it was before our new site design launched. That was a pretty massive modernization effort that included some site performance improvements. We also now have a sizeable team (100+) focused on some of the other details from the article. Brotli for instance went into A/B testing this month.
There are a lot of moving parts and changing priorities at a company the size of Walmart, and development and deployments can be slower than at smaller shops. But there definitely is active progress on improving our site speed.
And if you like working on any of these kinds of systems we are always hiring!
Glad to hear it. I find Walmart's web site to be so slow on my PC to be almost unusable. I hate to think what the experience must be like for users on old computers or really low end phones.
On older PC, dsl (rural), Windows 10, and latest Chrome. It is more than acceptable for me because it works. Lots of cute websites don't because of broken JavaScript or slow library downloads.
Guessing you haven't worked on a large distributed system or been responsible for revenue-producing LOB software deployments managing hundreds of millions in revenue. "Shit" like this is important. Like lose-your-job important.
This is a great write up from earlier this year, and from the screenshots it looks like it was before our new site design launched. That was a pretty massive modernization effort that included some site performance improvements. We also now have a sizeable team (100+) focused on some of the other details from the article. Brotli for instance went into A/B testing this month.
There are a lot of moving parts and changing priorities at a company the size of Walmart, and development and deployments can be slower than at smaller shops. But there definitely is active progress on improving our site speed.
And if you like working on any of these kinds of systems we are always hiring!