A tech lead at CERN describes the ongoing modernization of EDH, a 30-year-old monolithic administrative platform handling HR, finance, and operations for the entire organization. The talk covers why a full rewrite was ruled out, the failed attempt at in-place modularization, and the chosen strategy of forking the codebase to incrementally refactor the core, define clear domain ownership, introduce contract-first APIs, and migrate documents one by one. Key topics include reducing blast radius through independent deployability, semantic versioning governance for extracted core libraries, downstream compatibility testing pipelines, and the organizational challenge of shifting accountability from a central core team to distributed product teams across ~80 developers.
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