Another year and another post about managing legacy web applications.

My experience and work for the last year has involved getting heads down on countless projects, some brand new and others inherited after years in the works, and some using code created more than 10 years ago. If you’re familiar with how much the web development landscape has evolved in the last decade, you know supporting old applications were built in a different era. Flash still came with browsers, XML, SOAP and XHTML were things, and PHP 5.3 was still supported.

Holding on to complicated and outdated applications provides a serious challenge for the whole organization. Migrating may not be possible, a rebuild is likely expensive and doing nothing means hosting a site with an forever growing list of potential security issues. Ultimately, a change is inevitable - no company, organization, or team can afford to stay so static as to not improve (even if change comes at a glacial pace).