Midsize Startup Impulsively Adopts Trendy JS Framework in Effort to Rectify Insurmountable Technical Debt

February 20, 2017

PALO ALTO, CA - In a flailing attempt at reining in the company's frontend atrocity, technical cofounder Elliot Chandler revealed on Friday his decision to flush the majority of the company's client-side codebase down the proverbial toilet. The announcement was made to the technical staff during this week's engineering all-hands meeting, and was met with an especially enthusiastic reception.

For the better part of a year, the startup had been keeping its higgledy-piggledy JavaScript monstrosity on life support - the bulk of which was inflicted by Chandler himself before the startup had raised any capital. New engineering hires did their best to triage code health while adding new features at a breakneck pace, but the priorities of the company - combined with the founders' intense focus on growth - resulted in a source code corpus that Chandler himself described as an outright calamity.

During the all-hands, Chandler remarked he had realized they reached an inflection point when the most contentious engineering issue was no longer their grotesque collage of deployment shell scripts. The team eagerly agreed, and added that their collective bellyaching, commiseration, and passive-aggressive commit messages had indeed surpassed critical mass. Emboldened by the blank slate before them, the team elected to spend the remainder of the meeting in a fiery and divisive debate about which framework-du-jour was sexy enough to merit selection.

Later on Friday, Chandler composed an email to the engineering team formalizing their choice, and giving general guidance as to how their existing scab of a codebase could be efficiently picked off. In the email, he encouraged the team to consider contributing to a future blog post about the company's decision to adopt this particular framework, which he insisted would help with recruiting and help spice up their snoozer of an engineering blog.

That evening, Chandler was seen writing himself a reminder to think of ways to broaden the company's pathetic test coverage.

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