Escaping the rewrite trap: how to evolve legacy systems without losing momentum

When your platform is critical to how your business runs – and that platform is showing its age in increasingly frustrating ways – a rewrite can feel like the cleanest route to modernisation. But it’s rarely that simple.

In this episode, we speak with Tom Hill, Director of Engineering at Corsearch, about the false economy of a rewrite (and the realistic alternatives).

With years of experience balancing deep technical debt against ambitious product goals, Tom shares hard-won lessons on what it really takes to evolve complex systems under pressure. We get into the weeds of brittle codebases, scaling bottlenecks, and team morale, and explore proven approaches to modernisation – from the strangler fig pattern to rebuilding context before you write a single line of code.

If you’re leading engineering on a platform that’s outgrown its architecture, or just trying to move faster without breaking what works, this is a conversation for you.