New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

Slaying the Goliath: Lessons learned from a full system re-write

Brian Genisio shares the lessons we learned from our multi-year journey, including project planning, team management, technical challenges, testing and deployment, and post-project analysis.
July 18, 2023

At Khan Academy, we recently completed a full system rewrite, code-named “Goliath.”

 

This daunting task took 3.5 years, replaced over one million lines of code, and required almost 50 person-years of effort to complete. We achieved this all without any downtime or significant user impact. In this presentation, we will share the lessons we learned from our multi-year journey, including project planning, team management, technical challenges, testing and deployment, and post-project analysis. Our goal is to help other engineering managers and leads successfully navigate similar projects, avoid some of our pitfalls, and achieve a successful outcome.