Iurii Uses: #Technical Debt

We took over a Next.js project from another agency and inherited a mess — failing builds, no tests, deployments that worked locally and broke in production. Iurii spent two weeks getting it stable before touching any new features. He documented what was broken, fixed the critical issues, and left us a short list of the smaller things we could handle ourselves. By the end the project was actually maintainable, which had felt impossible at the start.

Our app had slowed to a crawl and the previous developer had left no documentation. Customers were starting to churn over load times. Iurii profiled it instead of guessing, found a handful of unindexed queries and a runaway N+1 that were doing most of the damage, and had page loads back under a second within the first week. He fixed the actual causes rather than throwing more server at it, and wrote up what he changed so we wouldn't repeat the same mistakes.

I'd built most of our MVP with Cursor and it looked finished — it compiled, the tests were green, the demo worked. It just wouldn't survive real users. Iurii took it over and found what I couldn't see: authentication handled four different ways, tests that only asserted what the code already did, and a dependency list half of which was unused. He didn't rewrite it from scratch — he told me honestly what was salvageable, ripped out the dead code, and got it to something a real team could build on. Two weeks and it went from 'looks done' to actually shippable.

We had an acquisition offer on the table and I needed to know whether our own codebase would survive the buyer's technical review before I walked into that room. Iurii did a five-day independent audit and gave me a written report I could actually act on — what was solid, the two things that would raise flags in a data room, and what it would take to fix them first. He caught an undocumented dependency on one ex-contractor's private package that would have been a red flag the moment their team looked. We cleaned it up before diligence started, and the deal closed without a single technical concession. Best money I spent on the whole process.