My task: Take a top 500 website, all written in smalltalk (no documentation), and port it to a modern scripting language. The company has: no money, a hostile c

My task: Take a top 500 website, all written in smalltalk (no documentation), and port it to a modern scripting language. The company has: no money, a hostile customer base, angry previous engineers, angry management, and hostile current employees. The site generated billions of webviews and was all unstructured (no database) user generated content. It was grueling. There was only one smalltalk engineer that would talk to us (the others quit, or weren't paid). Getting the dev environment running was impossible due to license issues with cincom. Luckly, I was able to get 3 smalltalk endpoints that would dump XML -- using the last remaining favors we had with the last small talk dev. Using this and layers of hacks we were able to start porting in 6 months. The site was sold (3?) times and was ported again to something else.