Android Guild Week at Strava
Article Summary
Todd Santaniello from Strava reveals what happened when their entire Android team stopped shipping features for a week. The goal? Break apart a 6.5-year-old monolithic codebase that was crushing build times and developer velocity.
Strava's Android team dedicated their Guild Week to modularizing their app, which had grown to 77% of code concentrated in a single module. They aimed to improve build speeds, code readability, and enable faster development iterations through mini-apps.
Key Takeaways
- Created 8 new modules and reduced monolithic code from 77% to 74%
- Mini-apps achieved 4x faster build times for feature development
- Untangled legacy code revealed years of tight coupling and complexity
- Consolidated all strings to one module, simplifying translations
- CI build times initially increased 23% due to dependency changes
Critical Insight
One week of focused modularization created the foundation for 4x faster development cycles, despite short-term CI slowdowns that required infrastructure adjustments.
