2024
Meridian
Load times down 80%. Engineering velocity up 3×.
The Challenge
Meridian had built their core analytics platform on a five-year-old Rails monolith. As the product grew to serve 12,000 daily active users, the architecture started showing its age — deployments took 40 minutes, pages loaded in 8–12 seconds, and adding new features required touching code nobody fully understood anymore. The engineering team was spending more time managing technical debt than shipping value. They needed a path forward that wouldn't require shutting down a live product.
The Solution
We started with a six-week discovery phase embedded inside Meridian's engineering team — reading code, sitting in sprint planning, and talking to the developers who lived with the pain daily. The goal was to understand the system before proposing anything. Our recommendation was an incremental strangler fig migration: build a new Next.js frontend that progressively replaced pages of the old Rails app, while extracting backend logic into focused services over time. No big-bang rewrite. No flag day. We delivered the new architecture in three phases over eight months. By the end, page load times had dropped from an average of 9.4 seconds to under 1.2 seconds. Deployment time went from 40 minutes to 4. The engineering team, now working in a codebase they understood, shipped features in days rather than weeks.
