A collection of experiences, learnings, and "aha!" moments from my software engineering life. I share my discoveries, struggles, and insights that might help fellow developers.
This was a year-long journey that transformed how we build software. We migrated over 50 React.js applications into a single, unified system that manages them allāand it completely changed the trajectory of our product.
We were dealing with a very large, fragile codebaseāover a million lines of codeāthat was slowing down everything: development, testing, deployments, and starting to negatively impact user experience. The system had grown organically over years, and technical debt was compounding daily.
Every change felt risky. Every deployment was nerve-wracking. The codebase had become a liability instead of an asset.
I proposed a foundational architectural rewrite that would dramatically simplify the entire system. It was a risky moveāthe product was driving roughly $50M worth of traffic, and initially, most stakeholders were against it due to the potential risk.
But I believed it was necessary. The status quo wasn't sustainable, and the longer we waited, the harder it would become.
I took full ownership of the initiative. I put together a clear technical plan, de-risked the rollout with incremental migration strategies, and personally stood behind the outcome. This wasn't just about writing codeāit was about convincing stakeholders, managing risk, and executing carefully.
We executed it incrementally and safely, migrating applications one by one, ensuring stability at every step. No big-bang releases. No downtime. Just careful, methodical progress.
The results were significant:
That's rightāwe went from 1,000,000+ lines to ~30,000 lines. A 97% reduction in codebase size while maintaining all functionality.
What I'm most proud of isn't just the technical win, but the company-wide impact:
This migration touched every part of the organization, and the improvements cascaded through every team.