Migrating a Production Mobile Site from .NET to React SSR
by Davor Santic | 2017-10-08
The mybestbrands mobile migration — on schedule, still in production eight years later. What went right, what I would do differently.
>In 2016 we rebuilt the mybestbrands mobile site — the company's first universal React application — from a legacy .NET mobile stack.
>React SSR on Node.js was still early. The hard part was not the framework; it was retraining a .NET team around an asynchronous runtime and a very different deployment model.
>We kept the migration on schedule by cutting scope in two places: no feature parity with the old admin tooling, and no simultaneous design refresh. Both waited.
>What I would do today: skip hand-rolled SSR entirely and start on Next.js. What survives eight years later is what we did right — small team, shared architecture with HQ, one pipeline.