Three years into my career, I raised my hand for a job that more senior engineers on the team had quietly decided to avoid.
We'd inherited a system. Two outside vendors had built it, then handed it over to an in-house team with zero documentation. Everyone was new. Nobody fully understood how it worked, and nobody wanted to be the person who touched it and broke production.
Then leadership dropped the mandate: make it scale to 5,000 concurrent users, turn it into multi-tenant SaaS, and support per-client authentication — some tenants on Active Directory, some on LDAP, some with their own mechanism.
The existing system couldn't do any of that. And the people best equipped to fix it were the most afraid of it.
I took the challenge. Here's what the black box actually looked like, and the method that got us through it — with one Senior DevOps, in about two months.
