Solentrex · March 2026
Taking over a 14-repo platform from an agency
When engineering moved in house I took over the whole platform as the only in-house engineer.
What it was
Solentrex is a solar CRM platform spread across fourteen repositories: two Angular apps, seven .NET services, two Python AI services, and the marketing site. An outsourced agency built it and ran it. I joined in December 2025 doing QA, which meant I spent my first months reading the product against the code.
By February the company was weighing whether to keep engineering outsourced or bring it in house.
What I did
I wrote up an evidence-based picture of the platform: what each part of the product actually did, checked against the running application and the source, with the file and the behavior written next to every finding. I took it to leadership in March 2026.
Engineering moved in house that month, and I took over the platform as the only in-house engineer.
The first thing I changed was not a feature. It was how work gets proven. I built a local stack that runs the whole product on one machine, isolated from production, so a change can be tested in seconds instead of waiting on a shared pipeline. Then I wrote down what counts as evidence: drive the real app, judge by network calls and database rows rather than by a screenshot, and trace the cause to a file and a line before calling anything fixed.
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering spend | Outsourced | In house, down about 95% |
| Testing a change | Shared cloud pipeline, about five minutes per run | Full workflow on an isolated local stack |
| Definition of done | A visual check | Signals measured, cause traced to file and line |
What it produced
In the first three weeks alone I pushed more than 280 commits across six repositories, mostly to keep the platform moving while the handover settled. Across the five months since, the four core repositories took roughly 1,800 commits and about 800 merged pull requests from me, while the product kept shipping: financing, energy analysis, and design.
Engineering spend fell by about 95% and stayed there. That is the number I would defend first, because it is the one the company can check on an invoice.