Code rescue · Production recovery
Production recovery
A four-week recovery of a strained SaaS codebase — latency, pipeline, and ownership restored.
Challenge
Team velocity had collapsed. Every release risked regressions, critical endpoints averaged 840ms, and security gaps were blocking enterprise conversations. There was no reliable deployment pipeline and no trustworthy test signal.
The system had live users, so there was no big-bang rewrite window. Recovery had to happen on a running production system, in a sequence that reduced risk at every step.
Solution
We mapped service boundaries, data-access patterns, and release paths, then sequenced the work: stability first (deploy and monitor), then performance, then structural refactors behind stable interfaces.
Remediation was phased — critical-path profiling, query fixes, CI pipeline restoration, security patches, and incremental module extraction. Every change shipped with a written rationale so the internal team could keep the system healthy after handoff.
Key outcomes
Key features
Architecture audit
Service boundaries, data-access patterns, and release paths mapped.
Performance engineering
Critical-path profiling, query fixes, and targeted caching.
CI/CD restoration
A gated pipeline: lint, test, build, and canary-style releases.
Security remediation
Dependency policy and automated vulnerability scanning.
Observability
Structured logging and alerting on error-budget hotspots.
Ownership handoff
Runbooks and documented decisions for the internal team.
Technology stack
- React
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
- Sentry
Architecture
The recovery plan put deployment and monitoring on the critical path first: a gated CI/CD pipeline in front of the API layer, observability wired into the hot paths, and the data store stabilized before any structural refactors.