Easy and Proven Way to Turn any Codebase to Brand New

Do you work on a legacy project you want to improve for years,
but don't know where to start?

Do you feel this must be an easier and sustainable way to upgrade
without burning your full year budget?

Are you curious about hidden gem tools that handle work for you and give you space and time for creative and important work?

Are you dedicated to invest a year to erase 10 years of technical debt and keep it upgraded forever?



This book is right for you →


In writing since May,
to be released by end of 2025

Get Early Access

5 Skills this Book will Teach You

  1. Build a 1-year strategy for upgrading one step every day
  2. How to choose the right priorities from amidst legacy projecttool chaos. You'll know what is important and what is nice–to–have trap of useless work
  3. Discover new upgrade tooling you can delegate tedious boring work to
  4. Learn how to use tools in the optimal order, to get most value with least manual work from your side
  5. Turn frustration from working with legacy code to joy and privilege to build on shoulders of giants and leap to disruptive evolution

7 Content-Loaded Parts


1. Myths

In this part, we'll look at most common myths. They're often based on single failed upgrade. One experience is not enough to set a standard. We'll critically look at various myths and what is reality of every day upgrades based on dozens of successful upgrades

14 chapters • done • published Sept 25

2. Prepare

This part... @todo

14 chapters • done

3. Analyze

8 chapters • in progress • finishes mid-October

4. Git for upgrades

12–15 chapters

5. Execute

~12–15 chapters

6. Review

TBD chapters

About the Author


Tomas Votruba is a trainer, a book author, a developer, a coach, an upgrade master and the most frequent lover of legacy projects.

He used to do legacy project upgrade training back in 2015-2017. On one training, he felt he's having a "deja vu" moment. He was there before. Yes, he was, he did training in the company exactly a year ago. Not only the same company, but the very same training.

To his shocking surprise, nothing has changed. To audience, everything seemed new and interesting.

"Not possible" Tomas thought, "in year they must have solved it". Well, they did not.

Upgrade project workload was the bottleneck. To solve it, he made now standard and well-known tool to automate the ugprade work - Rector. His goal was to remove "legacy" from developers' vocabulary by 2025. As you know, it did not happen.

More and more clients have been reaching out to him, to ask for help with upgrades.

Nowadays, the knowledge is the bottleneck.

You won't learn how to drive a car by buying one. You have to take driving lessons, then get experience out in the wild in various situations and weather conditions. That's how you master the driving.

Same applies for legacy project upgrades. First upgrades are the hardest, but that's usually the last upgrade you do.

So he started writing a book to share his 50+ project upgrade experience with you to give you a head start. To get you to the future faster, cheaper and with struggle that is meaningful.

© 2025 Tomas Votruba