Writing
Notes on systems that have become hard to change.
Positions and working methods for the engineers and executives who have to decide what to do with a system the business still runs on. A small library, kept current, rather than a feed.
Legacy modernization
11 min read
Why rewriting a legacy system is often the wrong first move
An old system’s value is its behaviour, not its code. What a rewrite has to rediscover, what it leaves unchanged, and what to do before committing to one.
Cost of change
7 min read
Seven signs your software has become too expensive to change
The symptoms that show a system has stopped absorbing change cheaply, what tends to cause each one, and what to measure before deciding what to do.
Legacy modernization
8 min read
How to modernize a legacy system without rewriting it
A practical sequence for incremental modernization: find where change costs, make failure visible, pin down behaviour, then replace piece by piece.
Systems integration
7 min read
Why integrations fail silently, and how to make them fail loudly
The failure modes that let integrations break unnoticed, and the engineering that surfaces them: idempotency, retries, quarantine, replay and alerting.
Technical assessment
7 min read
What a technical assessment of a legacy system should include
What a credible assessment examines, what it should deliver, how long it takes, and the warning signs of one written to justify a decision already made.
Have a system like the ones described here?
Describe what you have and what is making it difficult to change. You will get a direct answer about whether there is a sensible engagement here — including when there isn’t.