Inherited codebases don't come with instructions... mine came with 900-line React pages, conflicting useEffects, no shared components, and a codebase full of independent silos that had never talked to each other. As the new app lead, that was officially my mess to own.

In this talk, we'll take a real-world example of a messy React page and surgically refactor it: identifying the biggest wins, extracting reusable patterns, and building an approach that doesn't just fix one file, but changes how your entire codebase grows.