Event-Driven Modernization at DEPT

I joined DEPT’s legacy migration project and led the way on system modularization and an event-driven microservices architecture on Azure, reshaping a legacy system into independently-deployable services that communicate through events rather than tight, synchronous calls.

Raising the team’s distributed-systems fluency. Getting an event-driven system right is as much about shared understanding as it is about code. I led the team through the concepts that make or break these architectures: temporal decoupling — reversing the direction of data ingestion and introducing asynchronicity between components so they no longer had to be available at the same moment — along with idempotency, eventual consistency, and patterns like the Strangler Fig and the outbox pattern. Turning this vocabulary into shared, working knowledge is what let the team design with confidence instead of copying patterns they didn’t fully understand.

Automated infrastructure with every release. I set up fully automated Azure infrastructure provisioning as part of each microservice’s release process, so every deployment stood up its own infrastructure reproducibly — no manual environment setup and no configuration drift. At the time this was the leading setup at the company, and it became the reference other teams looked to.

The theme running through it: modernization isn’t just new code — it’s giving a team the shared models, patterns and automation to build modular, event-driven systems they can actually reason about and evolve.