Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
#VoxxedDaysCERN26
How do you modernize a critical legacy system inside one of the world’s most complex scientific institutions — while keeping your users, your stakeholders, and your sanity intact?
At CERN, we’ve been rebuilding our enterprise document management platform — a core system serving HR, finance, and operational workflows — from a legacy Java monolith into modular backend services, a React frontend, and an event-driven workflow engine.
But this talk isn’t about chasing shiny tech. It’s about making sustainable architecture choices under constraints: decomposing a nearly 30-year-old legacy platform into modular services aligned with product group boundaries; introducing semantic versioning and release governance for shared components; migrating from direct database dependencies to API-based integration; replacing an embedded workflow engine with a standalone BPMN platform; and re-architecting a stateful UI stack into a stateless React frontend backed by modular APIs.
This isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s a story of trade-offs, lessons learned, and patterns that may help you navigate your own legacy challenges.
#VoxxedDaysCERN26
How do you modernize a critical legacy system inside one of the world’s most complex scientific institutions — while keeping your users, your stakeholders, and your sanity intact?
At CERN, we’ve been rebuilding our enterprise document management platform — a core system serving HR, finance, and operational workflows — from a legacy Java monolith into modular backend services, a React frontend, and an event-driven workflow engine.
But this talk isn’t about chasing shiny tech. It’s about making sustainable architecture choices under constraints: decomposing a nearly 30-year-old legacy platform into modular services aligned with product group boundaries; introducing semantic versioning and release governance for shared components; migrating from direct database dependencies to API-based integration; replacing an embedded workflow engine with a standalone BPMN platform; and re-architecting a stateful UI stack into a stateless React frontend backed by modular APIs.
This isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s a story of trade-offs, lessons learned, and patterns that may help you navigate your own legacy challenges.
![[VDBUH2026] Roberto Cortez - How difficult can it be to write efficient code?](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qSJf8yKoFhY/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] Roberto Cortez - How difficult can it be to write efficient code?
When we write code, we often prioritize completing our feature over performance. However, performance may become a bottleneck, requiring additional resources and time. When we reach that point, how should we proceed?
In this session, we will explore tools that can help us identify performance problems and focus our code improvements in the most beneficial areas. Some of these tools include AsyncProfiler, JMH, JFR, and others. Expect a session with lots of demos, live coding, real-life examples, and tips and tricks to help you get started on improving your code’s performance.")
![[VDBUH2026] Andra Ghibutiu & Alex Proca - Opening thoughts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qSzhiRLFcwY/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] Andra Ghibutiu & Alex Proca - Opening thoughts
[VDBUH2026] Andra Ghibutiu & Alex Proca - Opening thoughts")
