---
title: "Completing the Rewrite from Hell: Five Years of Technical Debt and How We Escaped - Aaron Stannard"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/completing-the-rewrite-from-hell-five-years-of-technical-debt-and-how-we-escaped---aaron-stannard-1f52jkzkq
source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deke8dAsLTI
type: video:youtube
source: "NDC Conferences"
published: 2026-07-07T09:17:37.402Z
updated: 2026-07-07T09:17:59.349Z
tags: ["architecture", ".net", "microservices", "technical-debt"]
reading_time: 50
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Completing the Rewrite from Hell: Five Years of Technical Debt and How We Escaped - Aaron Stannard

**[NDC Conferences](https://daily.dev/sources/ndc)** · 50 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A CEO and software developer shares a candid postmortem of a five-year technical disaster building SDK Cabin, a NuGet package fulfillment platform. The story covers a series of catastrophic architectural decisions made by an unsupervised developer: a generic repository pattern causing N+1 queries and Cartesian explosions, seven microservices for a two-person startup, untestable Razor Pages, billing bugs that gave away free product, and a test suite covering dead code paths. The talk walks through the gradual recovery using a strangler fig refactoring pattern, CQRS, architecture decision records, actor-model-based billing with Akka.NET, and AI-assisted code migration — while sharing hard lessons about management, architecture reviews, and the cost of not looking early.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deke8dAsLTI>

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---

Tags: [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#.net](https://daily.dev/tags/.net), [#microservices](https://daily.dev/tags/microservices), [#technical-debt](https://daily.dev/tags/technical-debt)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/completing-the-rewrite-from-hell-five-years-of-technical-debt-and-how-we-escaped---aaron-stannard-1f52jkzkq)