Building Swift in Public: Solve Hard Problems, Skip the Interviews

Ashwani — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 06:44:00 +0000

Hey Dev.to community!
I'm Ashwani, founder of Lumix Labs, and I'm building Swift in public - a tool that helps engineering teams ship legacy code 5x faster without risky rewrites.

We're Flipping the Hiring Model

Most companies ask for resumes, conduct multiple interviews, then hope you can actually build something. We're doing the reverse:

Show us what you can build
If we like it, we'll talk about working together

*No resumes. No interviews. Just meaningful contributions.
*

The Technical Challenge

After leading engineering at Meta and other tech companies, I've seen firsthand how technical debt cripples growing teams. Swift gives mid-sized engineering orgs the same capabilities I built at Meta, but at a fraction of the cost.
We're tackling problems like:

- Analyzing complex legacy codebases at scale
- Automatically identifying and fixing technical debt
- Creating deployment acceleration solutions
- Building developer tools that actually work

How to Contribute (and Potentially Get Hired)

Visit our GitHub repo: github.com/lumix-labs/swift
Check the contribution guidelines in the README
Find something that interests you or propose a new feature
Make a meaningful contribution
That's it - if we like your work, we'll reach out about paid opportunities

What Makes This Different

Any language welcome: Use what you're best with
AI tools expected: We don't just allow AI tools - we expect clever use of them
Fully flexible hours: Work when you're most productive
No management overhead: For self-driven developers who just build

Who We're Looking For

People who:

See interesting problems and can't help but solve them
Build rather than talk
Use AI as a multiplier, not a crutch
Don't need someone looking over their shoulder
Find and fix issues without being asked

If you've ever thought "I could build something better than this," here's your chance to prove it. Your contribution is your application.
The formal job posting is here, but honestly, we care more about what you build than what you say in an application.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

opensource #webdev #ai #programming #career #hiring

Technical Wealth: The CTO’s Hidden Advantage in Legacy Systems

Ashwani — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 13:09:55 +0000

The first in a series on how engineering leaders can transform legacy liabilities into competitive advantages

The Legacy System Tax Most CTOs Are Silently Paying

Sarah, a CTO at a fast-growing fintech startup, watched as her team’s deployment frequency steadily declined:

Year 1: Weekly deployments were standard
Year 2: Monthly deployments became the norm
Year 3: Deployments happened “only when absolutely necessary”
Each deployment required three engineers for approximately six hours, with frequent rollbacks. The impact on velocity was staggering — the ability to ship new features decreased by 65% over 18 months.

Sound familiar?

As CTOs and engineering leaders, especially at growing companies, we’ve been conditioned to think about “technical debt” — that accumulation of shortcuts and deferred maintenance that eventually slows everything down.

But what about its positive counterpart?

Introducing Technical Wealth

Let’s talk about “Technical Wealth” — the competitive advantage gained from high-quality, maintainable code and efficient deployment processes that compound over time to create business value.

Technical wealth isn’t just nice-to-have engineering purity; it directly impacts business outcomes:

Companies with high technical wealth demonstrate 2–3x faster time-to-market for new features
They report higher engineer satisfaction and retention (crucial in today’s hiring market)
They show measurably better financial performance compared to technically indebted counterparts
According to DORA research, high-performing engineering teams deploy 208 times more frequently than low-performers, with lead times that are 106 times faster.

This isn’t just an engineering metric — it’s a business advantage.

The Hidden Cost Calculator

Most engineering leaders have an intuitive sense that legacy systems slow them down, but without concrete measurements, it’s difficult to prioritize and justify investments in modernization.

Here’s a simple calculation that might shock you:

Monthly Cost of Technical Debt = 
(Engineer hours spent on workarounds per month) × (Engineer hourly cost) +
(Delayed feature value per month) +
(Incident recovery costs per month)

For a team of 10 engineers spending just 10% of their time on legacy workarounds, with an average salary of $150,000, this represents over $12,500 in direct costs monthly. Add the opportunity cost of delayed features and incident recovery, and the total can easily exceed $50,000 per month — over $600,000 annually.

This “technical debt tax” compounds over time as systems become increasingly difficult to maintain. The longer modernization is delayed, the more expensive it becomes to implement.

The CTO’s Modernization Dilemma

When facing legacy system challenges, engineering leaders typically consider three traditional approaches:

Complete Rewrites: Tempting but risky — research shows 70% exceed budgets by an average of 60%, and many never reach feature parity with the systems they replace.
Consultants: Expensive ($200–500K for moderate projects) with limited knowledge transfer and misaligned incentives.
Do Nothing: No immediate disruption, but technical debt compounds like credit card interest while competitors with better technical wealth eventually outpace you. But there’s a fourth option that most engineering leaders miss.

The Fourth Option: Incremental Acceleration

There’s a better approach that balances risk and reward: incremental acceleration.

This methodology focuses on:

Improving deployment pipelines for legacy systems without changing the systems themselves
Gradually refactoring critical components based on business impact
Building technical wealth alongside existing development work
Measuring and demonstrating progress continuously

The DORA State of DevOps reports consistently show organizations implementing these practices achieve significant improvements:

Multiple times faster deployment frequency
Substantial reduction in production incidents
Improved engineer satisfaction and retention
Better alignment between technical teams and business stakeholders
And all without the risk of rewrites or the expense of consultants.

The Technical Wealth Score

How do you know if you’re building technical wealth or just treading water?

The Technical Wealth Score measures your engineering organization’s ability to create and sustain business value through technology. It consists of five key components:

Deployment Velocity: How efficiently you deliver code to production
Code Maintainability: How easily your codebase can be modified and extended
System Stability: How reliably your systems operate
Engineering Velocity: How efficiently your team converts effort into value
Knowledge Distribution: How well information is shared across your organization

Each component can be measured objectively and improved systematically.

Next Steps: Assessing Your Technical Wealth

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the Technical Wealth framework and how it can transform your approach to legacy systems.

In the next article, I’ll share the detailed methodology for calculating your Technical Wealth Score and identifying your highest-leverage improvement opportunities.

For now, I encourage you to reflect on a simple question: What would your business be capable of if your legacy systems were 5x faster to deploy and maintain?

References & Further Reading

2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report — Google Cloud’s official analysis of the landmark DORA research showing elite performers deploy 208 times more frequently with lead times 106 times faster than low performers. How Elite Engineering Teams Deploy 208X More Frequently — A deeper analysis of the deployment frequency metrics and practical steps engineering teams can take to improve. DevOps Leaders Deliver Software 200 Times More Frequently Than Their Peers — ZDNet’s coverage of the DORA research findings, highlighting the business impact of deployment frequency improvements.

_We’re building Swift to help engineering leaders implement the Technical Wealth framework with big tech-like dev tooling at a budget price. We’re sharing our journey publicly as we build this solution. Follow along on Twitter/X or connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you’re a CTO or engineering leader struggling with legacy systems, I’d love to hear about your challenges. Reply to this article or DM me — your input will directly shape the solution we’re building._

DEV Community: Ashwani