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Documentation Index

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The Case Studies page re-frames real engineering challenges as arcade boss battles. Each case study is a “stage” with a named boss, a threat level, and a multi-phase breakdown of the problem, the complications discovered along the way, the strategy used to defeat it, and the XP (skills) earned from the victory. Visitors switch between stages using selector buttons at the top of the screen.

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Route

PropertyValue
Hash route/#/cases
Page headingBOSS BATTLES
SubtitleTALES OF SURVIVAL

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Stage Selector

Two buttons at the top of the page — STAGE 1 and STAGE 2 — act as tabs. Clicking a button replaces the displayed case study with the corresponding stage content. Only one stage is visible at a time.

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Case Studies

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Stage 1 — LEGACY_MONOLITH.EXE

PropertyValue
Boss NameLEGACY_MONOLITH.EXE
Level99
Sprite👾
Phase 1 — First Contact A 10-year-old PHP codebase handling everything from billing to birthday emails. Load times were measured in minutes. Phase 2 — Attack Patterns No documentation, zero test coverage, and a spaghetti database schema that had grown organically over a decade without any governance. Phase 3 — Strategy Applied the strangler fig pattern — gradually extracted microservices using Node.js and GraphQL while keeping the legacy system alive and in production throughout the migration. Victory Conditions
  • 90% reduction in load times
  • 100% test coverage on all newly extracted services
  • Developers stopped crying
XP Gained
Skill Unlocked
Microservices
GraphQL
Legacy Migration
Patience

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Stage 2 — STATE_MANAGEMENT_HYDRA

PropertyValue
Boss NameSTATE_MANAGEMENT_HYDRA
Level45
Sprite🐉
Phase 1 — First Contact Prop drilling so deep we found oil. A single React application running five different state management libraries simultaneously. Phase 2 — Attack Patterns Race conditions, stale closures, and components re-rendering 50 times per keystroke. Every bug fix spawned two more heads. Phase 3 — Strategy Standardised on Zustand for global state and React Query for server state. Deleted 10,000 lines of Redux boilerplate. Victory Conditions
  • App feels noticeably snappy to end users
  • Bundle size reduced by 30%
  • New features now take days instead of weeks to ship
XP Gained
Skill Unlocked
React Query
Zustand
Performance Tuning
The level numbers are meaningful within the boss-battle metaphor: Level 99 represents a maximally entrenched legacy problem, while Level 45 reflects a serious but more tractable architectural challenge.
Each phase label maps directly to a classic boss-fight structure: Phase 1 is the initial encounter (problem discovery), Phase 2 is the escalation (complications), and Phase 3 is the execution of the winning strategy.

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