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Refactoring
10 posts about Refactoring. Every summary links to the original.
Ready for Go 1.27 on Day One
GoLand 2026.2 introduces day-one support for Go 1.27 language features, tooling improvements, and profiling capabilities. The Go 1.27 release adds generic methods, promoted field names in struct composite literals, improved function type inference, and a dedicated profile for detecting goroutine leaks. To assist with code maintenance, GoLand integrates official go fix modernizers directly into editor inspections, the Problems tool window, and optional pre-commit checks. Developers can capture, visualize, and analyze goroutine leak profiles alongside existing CPU, memory, and mutex profiles within the IDE. Additionally, updated Modern Go Code Guidelines provide AI coding agents with Go 1.27 context and API changes aligned with the version specified in go.mod.
Artem PronichevGithub ·
The cost of saying yes has changed
Generating initial code patches has become significantly cheaper with AI agents, shifting the primary expense of small feature requests from writing code to debating scope in meetings. Teams can use agent-generated patches as diagnostic probes rather than final deliverables, turning abstract scope debates into concrete artifacts that reveal true system touchpoints and risks. However, low generation costs do not translate to low ownership costs, as changes touching areas like authorization, compliance, or public contracts still demand significant human review. Constrained attempts allow engineers to price uncertainty quickly and shift scope discipline from pre-implementation speculation to evidence-based code review.
Dalia AbuadasSlack ·
How Slack Rebuilt Notifications 📣
Slack redesigned its legacy notification architecture to address user confusion, conflicting desktop and mobile preference systems, and tight coupling between notification content and push delivery. The engineering team unified four separate preference models into a single framework with three channel options: All new posts, Mentions, and Mute. To ensure safe rollback and backwards compatibility without direct database mutations, Slack implemented a read-time translation strategy alongside a new desktop_push_enabled preference and auto-saving cross-platform React UI components. This decoupling of activity from push delivery resulted in a fivefold sustained increase in settings engagement, reduced reliance on per-channel overrides, and eliminated synchronization mismatches across mobile and desktop clients.
Frances CoronelGrab ·
Cursor at Grab: Adoption and impact
Following a multi-tool AI strategy, Grab integrated the AI coding assistant Cursor into its engineering toolkit in late 2024 to accelerate software development. Technical staff adoption reached 98% monthly active usage with a 50% suggestion acceptance rate, supported by custom monorepo indexing and preconfigured rules aligned with internal coding conventions. Engineers frequently apply the tool to unit test generation, code refactoring, cross-repository navigation, and routine API scaffolding, with over a third of merge requests incorporating Cursor. The rollout also encompasses non-technical personnel and product designers who, after receiving Git training, submit direct production UI fixes. Statistical evaluations using fixed-effects regression indicate a dose-response relationship between Cursor usage intensity and measurable productivity gains.
Akshay MisraGrab ·
How we reduced initialisation time of Product Configuration Management SDK
GrabX operates as Grab's central platform for product configuration management, where client services fetch configuration data via an eventually consistent SDK. Services handling around 400 MB of configuration data experienced startup cold starts taking approximately four minutes, creating service stress during traffic spikes. The engineering team resolved this bottleneck through a multi-phase optimization of how the SDK retrieves data from AWS S3. First, sequential downloads of common and service-specific datasets were replaced with concurrent fetching. Next, concurrent downloading and memory loading were applied across large configurations within subscribed services, followed by the complete removal of an outdated disk-caching fallback mechanism. Benchmarks across diverse configuration payloads showed an overall initialisation time reduction of up to 90%.
Ram Dilip PradhanGrab ·
How We Cut GrabFood.com’s Page JavaScript Asset Sizes by 3x
GrabFood.com faced high cloud costs while serving over 1 TB of weekly network egress across 175 million requests. To minimize egress and improve page performance, the engineering team audited and reduced their webpack dependencies using tools such as webpack-bundle-analyzer and dependency-cruiser. Their strategies included lazy loading rarely used libraries, unifying duplicate modules under single entry points, and substituting utility libraries like axios with native browser Web APIs. Additionally, altering implementation approaches, such as replacing client-side signed JWT cookie encoding with plain JSON strings, eliminated heavy Node dependencies like crypto. These optimizations reduced JavaScript static assets from 750 KB to 250 KB, decreased CloudFront costs by 20%, and accelerated build times by 3.6x.
Gibson ChengGrab ·
App Modularisation at Scale
Grab transitioned its monolithic mobile application into a modular architecture to resolve increasing code conflicts, slow releases, and difficult team collaboration. The team decomposed the single module by establishing base infrastructure modules, shared UI and utility libraries, discrete feature modules, and bridge kit modules for inter-module communication. Dependency injection using Dagger ties these components together in the main app module while preventing feature modules from directly depending on one another. The architecture spans over 1,000 modules across the app, with more than 200 modules in the Grab Financial Group payments domain where over 95% of modules build in under 15 seconds. This approach accelerated Gradle CI and local builds through parallel compilation and caching, though it increased Gradle sync times, IDE memory usage, and configuration maintenance overhead.
Amar JainGrab ·
One Small Step Closer to Containerising Service Binaries
Engineering teams at Grab initiated a transition to containerized microservices to standardize environments, enhance security, and decouple services from internal runtime tooling. During this migration, developers noticed that statically-linked Go service binaries were reaching bloated sizes over 100 MB. By analyzing the binaries using the open-source tool go-binsize-viz alongside the Go nm toolchain, the team visualized compiled symbols as interactive treemaps. This analysis revealed that 11 MB of unused message format symbols were being pulled in because a generic interface shared a directory with auto-generated streaming code. Restructuring the packages to isolate interfaces from generated code successfully decreased the binary size down to 78 MB.
Stan HalkaGrab ·
Journey to a Faster Everyday Superapp Where Every Millisecond Counts
Grab undertook an initiative to reduce startup time and improve time to interactive (TTI) on its passenger mobile app. Because local benchmarks failed to simulate real device and network conditions, the team instrumented code in production across 8–9 million daily users to capture p50 and p95 metrics. Initial gains came from caching service tiles between sessions and removing a startup animation, saving four seconds. Architectural changes followed, including converting iOS dynamic frameworks to static linking and merging others, while Android initialisation was refactored with Kotlin coroutines. Replacing a heavy third-party analytics library with an internal experimentation platform yielded further startup reductions.
Renu YadavGrab ·
How We Implemented Domain-Driven Development in Golang
Building GrabPlatform's partner integration self-service portal initially resulted in an unstructured codebase where individual files exceeded 500 lines and lacked proper segregation. Modifying existing functions carried high risks of breaking functionality across imported source collections. To resolve this, the team restructured the Go application using Domain-Driven Design principles in coordination with product domain experts. They mapped business rules into bounded contexts, identified entities and aggregate roots, introduced repository interfaces, and utilized domain events for cross-context communication. The refactoring distributed core functionality evenly, simplified onboarding, and aligned technical terminology with business concepts.
Kapil Chaurasia