They say 10,000 hours
to mastery.
I have 10,000 days.
45 years of professional software engineering. I find the path through legacy systems — Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, BASIC, and whatever else your critical infrastructure runs on — and I make the modernisation happen, without losing a single line of business logic.
Your legacy systems
run the world.
Nobody knows how.
Decades-old legacy systems — Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Ada, and dozens of others — run the world's most critical infrastructure. The engineers who built them have retired. The documentation is incomplete. The business rules are buried in undocumented code.
Automated "lift-and-shift" tools fail because they carry 1980s architectural constraints into modern environments. Traditional rewrite teams fail because they lack the historical context to understand why the original code was written the way it was.
Syntax translation is the easy part. Undocumented COMP-3 arithmetic, 88-level condition names, and implicit GOTO chains require human judgment.
A developer who has never worked in legacy environments cannot reliably decode 40-year-old program logic — regardless of the language. The risk of silent errors is enormous.
Legacy systems rarely have automated tests. Without characterization tests built from the original behavior, you cannot know if the rewrite is correct.
Two phases.
Three paths forward.
Every engagement starts with a fixed-price Phase 1 analysis. After that, you choose your path — with full information, transparent pricing, and no lock-in.
Phase 1: Analysis & Documentation
A separate, fixed-price engagement. Deep AI-assisted archaeology of your legacy codebase — dependency mapping, business logic extraction, data dictionary, and a complete documentation package. You own the output regardless of what comes next.
Review Gate — Three Paths Forward
After Phase 1, you choose your next step with full information and no pressure. All pricing is transparent from day one.
Human Validation
45 years of pattern recognition applied to the AI's analysis. I identify implicit business rules, edge cases, and architectural quirks that automated tools miss. The intent of the original programmers is preserved.
Architectural Rewrite
The AI drafts the initial translation. I refactor it into clean, idiomatic, production-ready code following modern design patterns and your organization's standards. Not machine-translated — hand-crafted.
Rigorous Testing
We build Characterization Tests from the observed behavior of the legacy system, ensuring the new code produces identical outputs for identical inputs. Plus a full unit test suite targeting 80%+ coverage.
Transparent pricing.
You only pay for your complexity.
Discovery fees are credited in full against the final project cost if you proceed. Minimum engagement: $5,000.
Before committing to a full modernisation, commission a deep analysis of your legacy system. We document every business rule, data structure, and architectural decision — then hand you a complete picture. You decide what to do next.
Your system, always
in expert hands.
Once your legacy system is modernised, the work is not over. New requirements arrive, edge cases surface, and institutional knowledge needs to be maintained. A retained engineering partnership gives you direct access to the engineer who already knows your system inside out — without the overhead of hiring.
This is not a help-desk arrangement. You are retaining a senior engineer who already knows your system deeply — the rarest and most valuable thing in legacy modernisation. The engineer who rewrote your system is the one maintaining it.
Not every problem needs a bespoke engagement.
Some teams need a well-engineered foundation — with tests, docs, deployment playbooks, and automation already built in — without the overhead of a full modernisation project. LaunchOS.Studio is that foundation.
A white-label delivery system for hybrid agencies — deploy a med/dental website, funnels, and automations for a client brand in days using a repeatable install, QA, and handoff process. Every release reviewed by LJ Ribar.
Human expertise +
AI acceleration.
The AI handles the volume and speed. I provide the architectural judgment and validation that no automated tool can replicate. Together, we deliver modernized systems faster, more accurately, and more safely than traditional manual rewrite teams.
Across five decades of professional practice I have worked in Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, BASIC, C, C++, and many others. That breadth means I can read legacy code the way its authors wrote it — and find a process that works for your specific system.
Ready to modernize
without the risk?
Start with a Discovery Phase. Tell me about your system and I will provide a flat-fee Discovery quote within 24 hours. No obligation. No guesswork.