legacy systems Archives

Project & Team Management

Balance Legacy Modernization with AI Innovation: A Practical Roadmap

Say your team is debating overhauling a legacy system holding your product back, but AI tools are hyped as the next big thing. What's next?

ChatGPT

Generate CTEs for a Legacy Database Using an LLM

Here's how to use the power of LLMs to generate Common Table Expressions, making a legacy database easier to work with for ad-hoc queries.

Development

The Most Important Tool for Working with Legacy Code: Empathy

When I'm scratching my head, trying to figure out what the author of some legacy code was thinking, I try to put some empathy into practice.

React / Redux

How to Create and Export Web Components From a React Application

On a recent project, we wanted to export a handful of components from our React application for use in a Vue web application. Web Components to the rescue!

.NET / WPF

How to Extract Data from a Legacy Visual FoxPro Application

If you’ve been challenged to extract data from a Visual FoxPro database, use this recipe to get a development environment up and running fast.

Development Practices

Exploding Breadcrumbs Make Life Easier for Your Future Self

Your future self will be thrilled when they encounter exploding breadcrumbs instead of a unworkable project.

Development Practices

Today’s Code Is Tomorrow’s Legacy Project – Make It Easy to Resurrect

Getting legacy projects running again is never fun. Leave some breadcrumbs, and your colleagues & future self will thank you.

Development Practices

Need to Understand Some Legacy Code? Start with a Test!

Debugging legacy application is never easy, but you can make understanding it less of a chore by adding a unit test. Includes rationale and examples.

Development Practices

Need to Debug a Legacy App? Throw an Exception

Make debugging a legacy app less of a chore by throwing an exception–it's cheap, quick, and easy.

Development Practices

Your Codebase Is a Garden – 5 Essential Code Maintenance Practices

Just like a growing office plant, a software project needs constant maintenance to stay healthy.

Development Practices

Diff, not That

Do you know about the --ignore-matching-lines option to GNU diff? I recently found a great use for it on a recent project here at Atomic.

Development Practices

Testing and Legacy Code, A Primer

As much as we all might like to throw out legacy code, and “do it right,” that’s often an entirely impractical option or just a plain dumb thing to do.