Legacy .NET modernization for the Mittelstand.
15 years of hands-on engineering. I audit, plan, and guide the transformation of monolithic systems — and the processes and people around them — while your business keeps running.
15 years .NET · Rhein-Main & remote · DE / EN · Available now · limited capacity
What I do
Legacy modernization
Your system earns money every day — you can’t shut it down for a two-year rewrite. I audit what you have, build a roadmap, and guide your team through incremental modernization: stakeholders, developers, and codebase together. I’ve already made the thousand mistakes, so you don’t have to.
Typical engagement: audit first, then guided execution at 1–2 days per week.
Testing culture that pays for itself
If your QA is one person clicking through the UI, every release is a gamble. With AI-assisted test generation and .NET Aspire, real integration tests have become affordable — a productivity booster, not a tax. The outcome: deploy on a Friday evening without fearing the weekend.
Typical engagement: workshop plus hands-on setup in your codebase.
Honest AI adoption
I won’t sell you “AI will 10x your team”. After 15 years of engineering craft and serious daily AI use, I can show you where it is genuinely strong, where it will burn you, and how to adopt it with compliance in mind.
Typical engagement: assessment workshop, then a guided rollout with your team.
Also book me for…
- Fractional tech lead / architect
- Code review
- Deadline rescue & extra senior capacity
- Trainings & workshops
- Architecture / process audits
How I work
You keep shipping while we change things
No feature freeze, no big bang. Modernization runs alongside your roadmap, in steps your team and your customers can absorb.
People and process before tools
A new framework fixes nothing if the review process is broken. I work with your team, not around it — the goal is that the improvements survive my departure.
I tell you what I won’t do
If a rewrite is the wrong call, I say so. If AI won’t help your case, I say that too. You get an honest assessment, not a proposal optimized for billable hours.
No lock-in
Success means your team is independent of me. Documentation, pairing, and handover are part of every engagement — not an add-on.
Engagement options
Transparent shapes instead of “price on request” games. Exact scope is always a conversation — that first call is free.
Lighthouse Audit
from €3,900
Fixed price: 2–3 days inside your system — architecture, code, and process — plus a written report and a roadmap session on top. About a week of work end to end, and a small, safe first step instead of an open-ended engagement.
Guided modernization
€900 / day
Retainer at 1–2 days per week: ongoing roadmap execution with your team — architecture, reviews, pairing, and the stakeholder conversations in between.
On-demand senior hours
€115 / hour
Book a block of hours, use them for anything: reviews, firefighting, pairing, consulting. No minimum commitment.
- AI tooling included — compliance pre-cleared on my side
- Or your AI stack instead — compliance stays on yours
- On-site in Rhein-Main
About
15 years of .NET — from the WinForms days to cloud-native with Aspire and OpenTelemetry. Enterprise and Mittelstand projects, team lead of up to 9 people, based in the Rhein-Main area, working in German and English. The full history — every role, stack, and responsibility — is on the experience page.
Full CV & experience →Not sure which of these you need?
That’s what the first call is for — it’s free.
Book a free 30-minute callPrefer email? mail@michael-martin.dev