Refactoring my SaaS Side Project as a Tech Lead — Part 1: Analysing the Current Codebase

I recently wrote about finally building and launching my SaaS side project called Visitor Bench. I built this project back in 2018 before I was a tech lead developer for a large media company. Although I was already an experienced developer who was used to writing well architected, properly tested, production ready code, for this project I was mainly interested in quickly launching a product that solved the problem posed by the first user this app was built for. I definitely followed the motto, “if you aren’t embarrassed by your product you have launched too late”.

Purpose of refactor

As mentioned in my previous article, I’m not going to actively look to find new customers for Visitor Bench but I still feel like there is unfinished business with the app from a technical perspective.

In my current role as a tech lead I have been a bit more “hands off” with React code than I would have liked in the last couple of years while I have been more focused on managing developers, roadmap planning and architecting solutions. Although I have been working within a React/Node.js codebase, it is now a legacy codebase that was initially built back in 2016 so I don’t currently have the opportunity to work with the latest in React tech in this role.