Working with JavaScript is exciting. There's constant change - in the language, the runtimes and the community. The last 24 months have seen the rise and fall of frameworks, libraries, platforms and best practises. All this change is great if you have the option to build smaller products, either starting from scratch or being given a green light to completely re-write an application in one go. But what if you can't do that? What if you have a valuable, scaled, complex product? How do you get to introduce these new ideas, best practices and frameworks? How do you effectively refactor your customer facing software to be the application you want it to be?

As the proud owners of a monolithic PHP and JavaScript codebase (with a side helping of Sass and Java), we were asking ourselves the same question. How do we remove our reliance on server-side templates, a monolithic codebase, shared pipelines and coupled services by replacing them with a fast, resiliant, clean and functional front-end backed by smaller, focused apis?

We came up with a plan and started the road to refactoring - this is our story of going beyond the monolith.