How We Decomposed Tinder's Monolith
Article Summary
Maxwell Elliott and Connor Wybranowski from Tinder turned what seemed like a 12-year project into a 6-month sprint. Their secret? Letting the compiler do the heavy lifting instead of manually untangling 150,000 lines of code.
Tinder's iOS monolith had become a productivity killer—slow builds, no clear ownership, and constant conflicts. The team needed a systematic way to break apart over 1,000 entangled files without causing production incidents. They developed an automation-first approach using compiler insights to map dependencies and extract code in strategic phases.
Key Takeaways
- Reduced monolith build time by 78% while extracting 1,000+ files
- Automation cut decomposition time from 12 years to 6 months
- Each moved file required edits to 15 other files on average
- Used directed graphs to identify leaf nodes and extract in phases
- Code review consumed 50% of effort; automation handled the rest
Critical Insight
Tinder decomposed their entire iOS monolith in under 6 months with zero P0 incidents by automating dependency analysis and extraction instead of manual refactoring.
