🎙️ We’re thrilled to welcome Aaron Stannard to Stir Trek 2026!
Aaron Stannard at Stir Trek 2026
Petabridge CEO, Akka.NET Founder, and .NET Contrarian
About Aaron Stannard
Aaron is the founder and CTO of Petabridge, and the co-founder of the Akka.NET open-source project. Prior to Petabridge, Aaron founded MarkedUp Analytics, a real-time in-app marketing and analytics service used by 1000+ developers. Prior to that he worked at Microsoft as a Startup Developer Evangelist.
Session: Completing the Rewrite from Hell: Five Years of Technical Debt and How We Escaped
1 May 2026 03:00 PM | The Matrix - Theatre 15 (10, 11)
Track: Application Development
Bad architecture decisions don’t just slow you down - they destroy business value. Poor coupling means you can’t add the features customers are asking for. Data model mistakes mean you don’t have the information to answer your questions, and a lot of your decisions can’t be easily reversed. You know the problems are there. You’ve known for years. But there’s never time to fix it properly - you’re too busy keeping the lights on.
Then one day, the stars align. You finally have time to tackle it. You open the codebase, ready to make things right - and realize you have no idea where to start. Everything is wrong. Every fix breaks something else. The whole thing feels impossible.
I’m a business owner. I had full authority to prioritize this rewrite. No one to convince, no budget to fight for. I still couldn’t make it happen for five years - even while watching money walk out the door.
This is the story of how we finally completed that rewrite. You’ll learn:
- Why we abandoned a full rewrite and pivoted to strategic refactoring instead
- How to assess whether your legacy system is salvageable (ours barely was)
- The architectural patterns - including the actor model - that would have prevented this mess
- How we used AI to accelerate the work (spoiler: it wasn’t vibe coding)
- The management failures that let this happen, and how to avoid them
This isn’t a talk about how smart we are. It’s about how we recovered from one of my biggest failures as an engineering leader - and what you can learn from our five-year journey through hell.
Connect with Aaron
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronstannard/
- Twitter/X: @Aaronontheweb
- Website: https://petabridge.com/
- Blog: https://aaronstannard.com/
Join Us at Stir Trek 2026
Stir Trek 2026 takes place on May 1st, 2026 in Columbus, OH. Don’t miss Aaron’s session — grab your ticket before they’re gone!
🎟️ Register now: https://events.humanitix.com/stir-trek-2026-edition