The notebook

All AI & LLMs Cloud & DevOps Industry Insights Laravel & PHP Modernisation Performance & Scale SaaS & Product Security & Compliance

Modernisation 10 posts

25 Jan 2026 Modernisation Replacing Excel With Custom Software: When It's Actually Worth It The threshold signals — multi-user editing conflicts, version chaos, formulas nobody understands, GDPR exposure in shared sheets — and an ROI calculation template comparing hours lost to a r... → 13 Jan 2026 Modernisation Leaving Shopify for Custom: A Replatforming Decision Framework A revenue-threshold framework: below ~100k EUR/yr Shopify's speed wins, above ~500k the fee stack and platform limits flip 3-year TCO toward custom/headless — with the migration cost and tim... → 26 Dec 2025 Modernisation When Your No-Code MVP Hits the Wall: Migrating to Custom Code The 2026 wave of Bubble/vibe-coded MVPs hitting performance, integration, and GDPR walls — the specific symptoms that mean it's time, what carries over (validated flows, data) and what doesn... → 22 Dec 2025 Modernisation Migrating off CodeIgniter and CakePHP, honestly I have shipped production systems in CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Laravel. Migrating between them is mostly unglamorous mapping work — here is what it actually involves. → 15 Dec 2025 Modernisation The rewrite that should not happen Clients ask me for rewrites far more often than they need them. Most of the time the honest answer is no — here is the reasoning I walk through before saying it. → 14 Dec 2025 Modernisation Rebuild vs Refactor: How I Help Clients Decide on Legacy Systems A concrete decision framework (change-rate of modules, domain-model fitness, maintenance share of IT budget) with the 2026 hook that legacy upkeep now eats 70-80% of IT budgets while blockin... → 08 Dec 2025 Modernisation Writing tests for code you did not write, in the right order Unit tests are the wrong place to start on inherited PHP. Characterisation tests — pinning down what the code does today — are what make an upgrade survivable. → 04 Dec 2025 Modernisation Inheriting a codebase with no tests and no author The original developer is gone, there are no tests, and production cannot stop. Here is the order I work in when a legacy Laravel codebase lands on my desk. → 27 Nov 2025 Modernisation Upgrading Laravel without a big-bang cutover Every legacy engagement includes someone proposing the rewrite. Here is the incremental upgrade ladder I use instead, and why it keeps winning on risk and cost. → 20 Nov 2025 Modernisation Laravel 5 to 8 on a system that could not stop running Three major Laravel versions, upgraded in place on a system processing real bookings and invoices every day. What I planned, what I measured, and what broke anyway. →