I was surprised too, when I saw their name in the Devops Handbook; apparently they were one of the pioneers of Devops. Talking with a previous employee, it sounds like they really reinvented themselves from an IT department to a little tech oasis within the company.
You can find some pretty awesome work on "traditional" companies. There are some pretty cutting-edge projects where I work too :) (but way more legacy migrations and boring financial CRUD apps).
I think one thing that doesn't always occur to programmers who haven't experienced is that really boring problems can be really interesting to work on.
(And really interesting problems can be really boring to work on, and really interesting companies can have a lot of cruft and technical debt under the hood.)
Their tech stack is similar to what you'd expect from any large tech company. I can't speak much to the server side of things (I worked on the iOS app) but I know they had everything ranging from older monolithic .NET apps to Node and Go micro services.
Their GitHub page (https://github.com/Nordstrom) doesn't have much in the way of internal projects, but it has lots of forks that will give you an idea of some of the tools they used.
To add to the curiosity, how is Nordstrom doing anyway, compared to other mall-type retail? I'm wondering if this forward-thinking in tech is allowing them to successfully fight "new" ecommerce such as Amazon
As far as retail companies go, they’re doing well. Stock isn’t doing great, but as far as I know they’re still quite profitable.
Being forward thinking in tech has helped them a lot with regards to being able to move pretty fast on new things. At the same time, a website as old as theirs has a LOT of legacy.
What's interesting to think about is how, in the lead up to the dotcom bubble/bust, I would think execs at tons of traditional retail/brick and mortar/consumer brands would have probably been like shit shit and then put more IT-focused organizational architecture components in place, which probably lead to many interesting technical solutions to many of the problems they faced (if they did it the right way). It would be cool to see different branching that lead to different technical solutions for common problems.
Unfortunately, as this was before the OSS boom that came later, we probably will never see these solutions out in the open.
