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How we think about technology decisions, and what we have learned delivering them.

Written by the people doing the work

Every piece here is written by an engineer who does this work, and sourced so you can check it. No trend commentary and no predictions.

Latest writing

Start here. The most recent thinking on decisions, delivery and modernization.

A three-column diagram splitting migration work between deterministic tooling, AI agents and human validation
AI engineering

Where AI Agents Help a Java Migration, and Where They Lie

Whether AI can rewrite legacy Java is settled: it can. The question your board needs answered is who certifies that the business logic still does what it did, and that answer has not changed.

11 min read

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Legacy modernization

What Spring Boot 4 Breaks: The Jackson 3 Blast Radius

Every Spring Boot 4 migration guide is written against a clean project. Yours is not clean. The API change is a weekend, and the propagation through a dependency tree you did not build is the quarter.

10 min read

Legacy modernization

Spring Boot 3.x Is EOL: Upgrade, Buy Runway, or Accept Risk

Your scanner has flagged an unsupported framework. Before you approve a migration budget, know that you have three options, not one, and that for some estates upgrading now is the wrong call.

11 min read

Practical resources

Checklists and frameworks we use on engagements, written up so you can use them without us.

Framework

The Spring Boot 3.x decision tree

Upgrade, buy runway or accept the risk, and the one count that predicts which of the three fits your estate.

Checklist

The Jackson 2 dependency audit

Two commands, three buckets, and the single number that belongs in your Spring Boot 4 migration plan.

Guide

Staging Spring Boot 4 across two releases

Take the supported framework now and sequence the Jackson move separately, once your upstreams ship.

Reference

The Jackson defaults that change your JSON

Six flipped defaults and one exception change that alter your payloads without altering your code.

Checklist

Four controls before an agent touches legacy code

What to lock, what to automate and what to review by hand before the first AI agent run.

Framework

Where AI fits in a legacy migration

The three-layer split between deterministic tooling, agents and the validation that stays human.

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