emile bosch (ツ)

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Rescuing TommyTomato's microservices stack

Client

TommyTomato

Year

2025

Category

Startup

Role

CTO support

The ask

TommyTomato delivers healthy school lunches to kids across the Netherlands. Their platform was built by an external agency as a multi-repo microservices setup. Then the agency went bankrupt, and TommyTomato was left holding a distributed system nobody in the building had built, sized for a company that no longer existed.

This was a rescue, not a refactor: survival first, elegance second. Get the platform into a shape that the CTO could actually understand, deploy and maintain, without a single missed lunch along the way.

What I did

  • Folded the abandoned multi-repo estate back into one deployable, easy-to-maintain monolith
  • Migrated the git histories along: every repo stitched into the new codebase with its history intact, so no archaeology was lost
  • Moved the live customers and payments to a new platform while the old one kept running
  • Worked alongside the CTO throughout, so the understanding of the system landed in the company instead of leaving with me. At the end, at least you know what’s going on in your own platform

How it went

Went live and migrated successfully. Kids kept getting their lunches, customers kept paying, and nobody outside the building noticed a thing, which for a migration is the highest possible compliment. A year later the monolith is still boringly deployable, exactly as intended.

1

deployable monolith, down from a fleet of repos

0

school lunches missed during the migration

100%

customers and payments moved over, live

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