"We cannot go on like this anymore!"

I've heard this phrase a few times in my personal and professional life, and every time it was a sign that a transformation was about to start. Moving my family to another country and software modernization have a lot in common, and neither of them succeeds as a big bang.

I've used lessons and patterns from each to make the other work. Patterns for splitting the monolith and decomposing a database, like strangler fig, parallel runs, and data liberation, helped me when we moved from Iran to Austria. And experiences, like keeping a family running across two contexts while the kids were still in Iran, learning German (the ubiquitous language of the new country), or looking for energy providers once I arrived, made me better at transforming legacy software.

If you're a software engineer or architect, join me for tales of success and failure from both journeys. You'll be better equipped to transform the big ball of mud in front of you, the next time someone says: "we cannot go on like this anymore!"