Make money doing the work you believe in
Salesforce needed to migrate a massive legacy codebase. Manual rewrite? 2 years. What they actually did? 4 months.
The breakthrough: dependency graph analysis. You can't translate interdependent code in random order, convert one file and it breaks without its dependencies.
So they mapped everything first. Found the natural layers. Migrated leaf nodes up to root, building on stable foundations at each step.
Automated the mechanical translation. Humans validated the architecture.
The real lesson? Scale breaks manual processes. What works for small codebases fails catastrophically at enterprise scale. The volume itself forced them to find a better way.
They didn't migrate because the old code was broken. They migrated because enterprise customers demand native platform integration and compliance teams won't approve external packages.
Sometimes the constraint drives the innovation.
