Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
When I started at my previous job as an IC, things looked similar - although they were at least using git already to share the code (deployments were made by uploading files to production anyway). The team was made up by a grumpy solo dev, an overly enthusiastic, hacker-type CTO, a very thoughtful but introverted engineering manager, and three junior devs. No tests, no migrations, secrets all over the place, no running locally, layers upon layers of hacks and required files, and a homegrown framework using obscure conventions (my pet peeve: the endpoint handler called was resolved dynamically by combining the request method and the URI part after &#x2F;api&#x2F;, so GET &#x2F;api&#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar would call get_bar on the foo controller. As every method was public, this would also work for delete_internal_stuff).<p>What I did was forming a mental plan on how to get the org to a more sensible state - namely, having the application run on a framework, within a container, with tests, have it deploy from CI into an auto-scaling cluster of container hosts, configurable via environment variables. That was difficult, as the seniors all had reservations against frameworks, tests, and containers. So I went slowly, introducing stuff one by one, as it made sense:<p>* I started by rewriting core code as modules, in particular the database wrapper. They had cooked up an OOP abomination of mysqli-wrapper, instead of just moving to PDO. So I wrote a proper PDO wrapper that exposed a compatibility layer for the old method calls, and provided some cool „new“ stuff like prepared statements. Modules like this could be installed from a private composer registry, which helped justify the need for composer.
* instead of going for Symfony, I created a very thin framework layer from a few Symfony components on top of Slim. This didn’t felt as „magic“ as the bigger options would have, and didn’t scare the devs away.
* to build up trust, I added an nginx in front of the old and the new application which used version-controlled configuration to route only a few endpoints to the new app selectively. This went well.
* now that we had proper entry points, we could introduce middleware, centralised and env-based config and more. In the old app, we reused code from the new one to access the configuration. Dirty, but it worked. More and more Code was moved over.
* I started writing a few tests for core functionality, which gave confidence that all this was really working fine. I wasn’t really able to make the other devs enthusiastic about testing as I would have liked back then, though.
* Testing showed the need for dependency injection, so I introduced PHP-DI, which brought the most elegant dependency injection mechanisms I know of. The senior devs actually surprised me here, as the accepted this without resistance and even appreciated the ability to inject instances into their code.
* deployments would require uploading lots of files now, so I introduced BuddyCI, which is probably the most friendly CI server. It would simply copy everything from the repository to the servers, which was a large step forward considering the seniors suddenly couldn’t just upload fixes anymore. 
* with the deployments in place, I introduced development and production branches, and let the team discover the need for fix and feature branches by itself.
* to avoid having to run both apps and nginx, I added container configuration and docker compose to spin up the stack with a single command. This convinced everyone.
* from there on, I added production-ready containers and set up kubernetes on Google Cloud (this is something I wouldn’t do at most places, but it made sense at this particular org). We deployed copies of the app into the cluster, and set up a load balancer to gradually move requests over.
* one by one, we migrated services to the cluster, until practically all workloads were running as containers. The images were built by the CI, which would also run tests if available, push the images, and initiate the rolling update.
* at this point, things were very flexible, so I could add delicacies like dynamically deployed feature branches previews, runtime secrets, and more.<p>All in all, we went from 80+ bare-Metal servers (some of them not even used anymore) to a 12 node GKE cluster. Instead of manually updating individual files, we got CI deployments from production branches. Secrets in the code were gradually replaced with environment variables, which were moved from source-controlled .env files to cluster secrets. Devs got confidence in their code due to tests, feature branches and local execution. From a custom „framework“, we moved to commonly known idioms, paving the way for a migration to a full framework.<p>What I didn’t manage was introducing database migrations, disciplined testing, and real secret management.<p>I hope this helps you, if only to draw inspiration to get started _somewhere_. Best of luck!