Prachyam Legacy — OTT Platform Stabilisation

Inheriting 1,669 Commits of Debt

The first thing I did at Prachyam was read the codebase. What I found across the TypeScript/Express API, Strapi CMS, Flutter mobile client, and Go microservice layer was 1,669 commits of accumulated decisions — some good, some expedient, some that had clearly broken things and been patched around rather than fixed. No single part of it was broken beyond use. The whole system was operating under a level of fragility that made every change risky.

Forensic stabilisation is not glamorous work. It means reading code you didn't write to understand what it was trying to do, then understanding why it's failing at it, then fixing the underlying cause rather than patching the symptom. I did this across the backend reliability issues first — the API crashes and silent failures that were degrading user experience — then extended to the Flutter mobile app.

What I Added

After stabilisation: multi-currency payment support spanning Razorpay, Stripe, and PayPal. Gamification mechanics in the platform that gave subscribers reasons to return beyond the content catalogue. A multi-platform TV rollout proposal — the codebase was web and mobile only, and I scoped and began the architecture for Apple TV, Android TV, and three other TV surfaces.

That TV architecture work became the justification for proposing a full rewrite. The legacy stack could not cleanly target TV surfaces without a complete rethinking of the cross-platform data contract. The Sangam monorepo — the 9-platform Nx TypeScript rewrite — came directly from that analysis.

The Inheritance Lesson

Taking ownership of someone else's production system, under real business pressure, with real users, is a different kind of engineering than building from scratch. You don't get to make the architecture choices; you inherit them and work within them. What you do control is what you prioritise, what you propose to change, and when you make the case for a clean rebuild versus another layer of patches. Getting that judgment right is what this work taught me.