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Legacy & Modernization.

Systems that have earned money for years and that nobody dares touch any more. When modernization is worth it, when another outcome is the right one, and what the road looks like when the business keeps running.

Where to start

The article that opens up this topic.

When modernization is the wrong answer

Modernization is not always the right answer to a legacy system. When freezing, standard software or retirement is the better call, and how to tell.

13 min read

All articles

The 30 further articles on this topic.

12 September 2026

Forty-four articles, five sentences that stayed

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12 September 2026

Rector in a legacy project

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12 September 2026

The handover day

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12 September 2026

What a modernization costs

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12 September 2026

Removing features nobody uses any more

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12 September 2026

An end-of-life calendar for the whole stack

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12 September 2026

Test data from production

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12 September 2026

Twelve weeks of modernization: a realistic plan

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12 September 2026

Ten holes that sit in every old PHP system

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12 September 2026

Introducing PHPStan into legacy code step by step

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12 September 2026

Modernizing with an external freelancer

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12 September 2026

Maintenance mode: running a legacy system safely

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12 September 2026

Shopware 5 plugins in the migration to 6

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12 September 2026

Dual write and backfill: where migrations really tear

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12 September 2026

Knowledge in one person is an architecture problem

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12 September 2026

Laravel upgrades: where the pitfalls differ

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12 September 2026

Composer as archaeology

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12 September 2026

Feature flags in a monolith without framework support

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12 September 2026

The business case for a modernization

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12 September 2026

Working through Symfony deprecations without drowning in the log

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12 September 2026

The real legacy is your database schema

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12 September 2026

Testing legacy code when there are no tests

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12 September 2026

Technical due diligence: assessing a legacy system in five days

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11 September 2026

Your developer is gone. The first week decides what it costs.

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29 August 2026

PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.4: what this upgrade really involves

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24 August 2026

Zend Framework 1 is still running. Support ended in 2016.

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3 February 2026

Go in a PHP world: adding high-performance services without rebuilding everything

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11 January 2026

Why full rewrites almost always fail

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10 July 2025

From Sphinx to Manticore Search: a migration about latency, relevance and operational discipline

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3 April 2025

Technical debt as business risk, and why nobody listens until it is too late

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