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by james_s_tayler 2320 days ago
Can you please do a blog post at the end of the project to let us know how it pans out as a case study?
1 comments

I think my original comment mischaracterized my project.

It is a refactor, but a refactor that is going to take about a year to complete, where there will be nothing to show for it until it is finished. From old codebase, probably about 20% to 30% of it will be ripped out and replaced.

Its not my first major project in terms of keeping this codebase capable. Previously written compilers/runtimes and IDE modules to keep it going : to gain control of codebase which was written in a commercial/proprietary dev environment into something I have full control over. That effort took a year.

The difference in this case is I am deliberately, intentionally throwing code away, alot of it, for the first time and contrary to my instincts. Still a post mortem might be interesting. My successful efforts to code my way out of a proprietary dev environment was an interesting and risky project, discussed at length with relevant dev communities at the time, but probably worth writing up one day.

Can you tell what area is this? Is it a backend service or something like software that runs on consumer's PCs?
Rich Client / Consumer PC. SQL backend (originally was proprietary DB), fairly tight coupling between UX and model, old school rich client event loop. An unhealthy amount of global state ( what the original programming language encouraged )