4 ms·
Spreadsheets, common. "maintained really well", not so common, so that's great! Congratulations, you joined a very resourceful company that was able to concent
by ac2u 7y ago
Spreadsheets, common. "maintained really well", not so common, so that's great!
Congratulations, you joined a very resourceful company that was able to concentrate ruthlessly on their product-market fit by leveraging the tech that they knew.
Now you can take all the spreadsheets and the glue code, and then cover the entire system with behavioural end-to-end tests.
Then you get to pick one part at a time and develop a replacement with a more standard stack, keeping the old and new part running in parallel, looking for differences in behaviour in order to discover functionality hidden in the spreadsheets and add to your test suite.
Then when it's all done you have a great story to tell about how you took a startup that had a great product-market fit but an unorthodox stack and migrate it to something that let the company hire from a more accessible pool of devs.
- teddyuk 7y agoThis 1 million percent! There is a real danger someone will come in, shout a lot and say the answer is to now re-write it all or buy in a system, maybe even outsource it to save money. Don't fall for it - have good tests and incrementally improve what doesn't work - don't listen to dreams of how easy life will be "if only you had a good system" - what you have works, and has scaled to 40k users - past that who knows but you can always copy/mirror everything you have and support 80k users etc.