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Technical Debt De-risking
Stabilizing a crumbling infrastructure before a major scale-up.
01. The Mess
Every new feature broke three old ones. The database was hitting 90% CPU daily. The senior architects were quit-level stressed.
02. The Surgery
I paused feature development for 14 days—a hard sell to the CEO—to implement automated regression testing and database indexing. We refactored the auth module which was the primary bottleneck.
03. The Cadence
Platform uptime went from 98.2% to 99.98% in 6 weeks. Feature velocity tripled because devs weren't fighting fires every morning.
Founder Context
"The founder was scared to stop feature work. I proved that 'going slow to go fast' would save the company $200k in infrastructure and churn costs over the year."