⚡ How 6 months of development turned into 3 weeks

🚨 The problem

The original dashboard was built using React and MobX over the course of six months by two developers. While it functioned well, maintaining it would have been significantly more work compared to a vanilla implementation.

The team decided to move to a vanilla stack to improve performance, reduce dependency overhead, and simplify long-term maintenance.

⚠️ The challenges

• Developers had to rethink how they built UIs without relying on framework patterns.
• Convincing management that a rewrite was not just an experiment, but a tangible productivity boost.

💡 The solution

A developer with little prior vanilla experience was assigned to the rewrite. The goal: achieve feature parity as fast as possible while improving performance and maintainability.

• Created a manifesto to align both the team and management, ensuring everyone understood how vanilla development supported project goals.
• Removed nearly all dependencies except for essentials (Excel export, charting).
• Rebuilt the app from scratch, completing the rewrite in just 3 weeks, using a standardized structure that avoided reinventing an in-house framework.
• Incorporated training and revisions to help the developer adopt the vanilla mindset.

📈 The impact

The rewrite resulted in a simpler, more maintainable, and higher-performing codebase with significantly reduced complexity.

• Reduced development time from 6 months to just 3 weeks—an increase in speed by 16× (or an 87.5% decrease in development time).
• Improved application performance, even though performance was not a primary concern.
• Proved that framework-free development can be highly efficient in the right environment.

This case highlights how much efficiency a vanilla stack can bring to a project. Sometimes, preemptively improving software yields better results than waiting for things to get out of hand.

🎓 The lessons learned

• Simpler technologies, while requiring effort to master, ultimately produce results much faster.
• Developers are much more resourceful than they believe when given freedom and support to explore solutions.
• Going with non-standard solutions can pay off big time when applied in the right context.