| I lead a migration very similar to this. We had taken over a system that was handed to a business person with all the technical team leaving because of a dispute. We rewrote the system and migrated all the user accounts over to the new system in a couple of months, after which we ran it for a couple more years, until the company got sold. I would say the most important learnings were: - there is lot of "extra stuff" around the product that is somewhat independent of "how complicated the product is". Even a simple CRUD app needs source control, a test suite, (ideally) some automated system for source quality check (like linters, analyzers, formatters, etc), a system for deploying it to a dev / staging / production environment, etc. - production also needs monitoring (both "is it working" and "is it working within the expected parameters" - for example is it fast enough). Ideally there would also be some alerting around this monitoring so that you don't have to wait for users to complain to find out that something is not working. - there is a saying of "use boring technologies" (https://boringtechnology.club/), which I 100% subscribe to. That will ensure that there are lots of examples for each aspect of the product you're trying to implement (for example authentication and authorization, creating an admin dashboard, etc). - In addition I would say "use some managed platform to offload lots of these worries". Yes, it will seem weird to look at the bill at the end of each month and say "why are we paying $Xk each month for Heroku when I can rent a server from Hetzner for less than $100?" - but managing that Hetzner server (and probably more than one server, to make sure that a single hardware failure doesn't take down your entire product), ensuring backups are working, etc would cost more. Optimizing between "buy" vs "build" is a delicate balance. In the end I think programmers who like to start new projects are a rare bread. I'd be happy to chat about this more (I'm also in Europe). Feel free to reach out to me at cratt[at]grey-panther.net. |