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.
It covers four subjects: legacy modernization, systems integration, technical assessment, and the cost of change that connects them. Each piece takes one question a business faces once a system it depends on has become hard to change — whether to rewrite it, why its integrations break unnoticed, what a slow estimate is actually measuring — and argues an answer.
Antegrate writes these down because the reasoning behind a recommendation should be open to inspection before anyone pays for it. Each piece is meant to be useful to a technical decision about a system, whether or not Antegrate is involved in it.
- Legacy modernization
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.
11 min read ·
- Cost of change
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.
7 min read ·
- Legacy modernization
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.
8 min read ·
- Systems integration
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.
7 min read ·
- Technical assessment
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.
7 min read ·
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.