3 Lessons from Stabilizing a Legacy Web App
by Leslie Alexander, Co-Founder / CEO
1. Create a reliability baseline first
Before rewriting, we added monitoring, logging, and a rollback path. That let us touch fragile areas with confidence and measure whether changes were helping or hurting. Without a baseline, refactors are guesswork.
Top tip
Ship dashboards and alerts before the refactor. You cannot improve what you cannot see.
2. Separate stabilization from feature work
We carved out a stabilization lane with its own weekly goals: performance fixes, dependency upgrades, and flaky test cleanup. Product work continued in parallel, but only on modules with clear boundaries. This kept delivery predictable while the foundation improved.
3. Document decisions as you go
Small notes on why we changed interfaces, removed endpoints, or added limits saved hours later. Decision records also helped onboard new engineers without rehashing the same discussions.
