[striglia]

Inherited a codebase that ran nearly all revenue-critical operations, and operated at its core on some of the most metaclassy/dynamic tools Python has at its disposal.

Luckily I work in a tech company where the fact that nobody knew this code and it took years to effectively ramp up on was argument enough that it should go away.

Actual removal was a much messier story. It had tangled deeply into adjacent systems so you couldn't "just replace it". We are in the later phases of something like the Strangler Pattern (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns...) where we built higher-level interfaces over the top and gradually re-implemented the underlying functionality without using any of these custom frameworks.

That said, it's a long term project that is easy to lose steam on. It's been very important to regularly revisit our goals and how we're attacking them...AWS has released services that fundamentally changed our approach (for the better) in the years since this effort started and we've probably cut off at least a year from the overall effort by adopting those instead of continuing on the original course.

I wrote up some of these ideas about accomplishing big projects that span years at https://medium.com/@scott_triglia/ask-a-tech-lead-i-have-to-.... The parts about regularly re-evaluating the next steps in your course of action were directly inspired by this project I just described.