“The team said Angular couldn't scale. It could.”

The situation

The platform lets incarcerated people start looking for jobs, therapy and housing before they’re released, so that when their parole officer takes over their case, their rehabilitation plan is already in the system. The app was buggy and unstable. A team of five engineers cost $280 an hour combined, about $48K a month. The lead engineer was rewriting the whole app from scratch, telling the owner that Angular couldn’t scale and the app was too buggy to stabilize.

What I found

In a meeting with the owner and his head of operations, the owner asked what I thought. Any framework can scale, Angular included. The real problem was that the team was writing Angular as if it were plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, ignoring basics taught in Angular’s own beginner examples.

What I did

• Spent a month fixing bugs and stabilizing the existing app, with no rewrite
• Upgraded the app by five Angular versions

The result

• My work covered what the whole team had been doing, so the owner let the other engineers go
• Engineering cost dropped from $48K to $8.7K a month, a cut of more than 80%
• Ongoing maintenance and new features now cost under $4K a month, with a single offshore developer