technical debt

A client's internal utility package started as a convenience. Two years later, it had 47 dependents, undocumented side effects, and a change to one date formatter broke invoice generation for three services.

A client's API had been running Node 16 for two years past end-of-life. When a critical OpenSSL vulnerability dropped, the "we'll upgrade next quarter" plan collapsed into a three-week fire drill. The upgrade itself wasn't hard. Undoing two years of drift was.

A startup founder built their MVP almost entirely with AI coding agents. It worked. Then they hired a team, and within two months nobody could ship anything. I got called in to figure out why.

A client's team was drowning in a 200K-line TypeScript monolith. When we finally measured what was actually running in production, we found that almost a third of it was dead code nobody had touched in over a year.

How 340 feature flags turned a codebase into a minefield — and the boring process that dug us out.