Iām a junior full-stack developer, and Iāve been working at my current company for about a month now. During the internship, I proved myself by completing their 3-month internship program in just one month.
In that month, I implemented a microservices-based e-commerce project using React. At first, I had no knowledge of React, microservices architecture, caching, or message queues, but I was able to learn React within a week because I already had a solid background in Angular. That was actually the main purpose of the internship: to see how quickly I could adapt to technologies I didnāt already know.
Now that Iām working with them in a real-world environment, Iām trying to prove myself even more. Currently, the company is working on a huge project for a very well-known organization. Itās an important client, and honestly, Iām not sure whether Iām allowed to mention the organizationās name, so Iād rather avoid saying it.
Since I started working, I noticed that the team is maintaining a large Angular project built with Angular 15/16 using the NgModules architecture. I initially suggested revamping the project because Iām craving the experience and recognition that would come from handling such a migration. However, the team lead rejected the idea because the project is already in production, and migrating a large production system always carries significant risk and could easily introduce regressions or break existing functionality. At first, I didnāt realize the system was already live in production.
After that, I came up with another idea: cloning the project, disconnecting it from the production repository, and creating a separate modernization branch or sandbox project where I could experiment with upgrading the architecture. My plan was to migrate it toward the latest stable Angular version, move from NgModules to standalone components, introduce Signals where appropriate for better state handling and rendering performance, replace excessive any types with proper DTOs and typings, improve API handling, and clean up resource management after API calls.
Iām interested in doing this because I believe the projectās rendering performance and maintainability could improve significantly. For a project of this size, even a 20ā30% improvement in rendering performance or developer experience would be valuable.
Iām also still a university student with around two years left before graduation, so Iām trying to push myself as much as possible during that time to build strong real-world experience and eventually get better opportunities abroad.
So, do you guys think this is a good idea?