Tom Smykowski is a Poland-based remote software engineer and consultant specializing in Angular modernization for EU, UK, and US teams. With nearly two decades of product delivery experience combining engineering, UX, and product thinking, he is the ideal partner for founders, CTOs, and executives looking to revitalize legacy Angular applications. His approach focuses on ownership from discovery through production, ensuring modernization projects deliver maintainable, scalable, and user-focused outcomes.
The Critical Need for Angular Modernization
Legacy Angular applications can become significant liabilities for businesses. Outdated versions, often AngularJS or early Angular 2+ iterations, suffer from performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and high maintenance costs. They hinder developer productivity and make it difficult to implement new features or integrate modern tools. Modernization is not merely a technical upgrade, it is a strategic business initiative to reduce risk, accelerate delivery, and improve the user experience.
Successful modernization requires more than just updating package versions. It demands a holistic view encompassing architecture, code quality, developer experience, and business goals. A piecemeal approach often leads to fragmented systems and technical debt. Tom brings a product-minded perspective to these projects, ensuring that every technical decision aligns with business objectives, whether you're scaling a B2B SaaS platform like Printify, building a fintech application, or modernizing an enterprise system.
Common triggers for an Angular modernization project include the end of Long-Term Support (LTS) for a version, difficulties in hiring developers for legacy skills, performance issues affecting user retention, and the need to adopt modern development practices like AI-assisted workflows or improved CI/CD pipelines. Addressing these proactively protects your investment and positions your product for future growth.
Tom's Approach to Modernization Projects
Tom employs a structured, phased methodology for Angular modernization, beginning with a comprehensive audit. This initial assessment evaluates the current codebase, architecture, dependencies, build system, and performance metrics. He identifies key pain points, security risks, and opportunities for improvement, providing a clear roadmap and priority list. This audit phase is crucial for setting realistic expectations and securing stakeholder buy-in.
The execution strategy is tailored to the project's scale and constraints. For smaller applications, a full rewrite or a direct migration using the Angular upgrade guide might be feasible. For larger, mission-critical systems like those in fintech or industrial SaaS, a more incremental approach is often necessary. This can involve creating a strangler fig pattern, where new modules are built with the target architecture and gradually replace old components, minimizing disruption to ongoing development.
Throughout the process, Tom emphasizes continuous delivery and developer experience. He integrates modernization work into the regular development cycle, ensuring teams can still ship features. This involves setting up modern tooling, such as migrating from Webpack to Vite for faster builds, improving test automation, and establishing quality gates. His experience leading frontend at Fream and on the Printify design system, which served 60+ frontend engineers, ensures the new architecture is scalable and maintainable.
Key Technical Focus Areas
A core focus of any modernization is upgrading the Angular framework itself. Tom manages the complexities of moving between major versions, handling breaking changes in APIs, RxJS, and dependency injection. He ensures that the upgrade path is smooth, with comprehensive testing to prevent regressions. Beyond the framework, he modernizes the surrounding ecosystem, including TypeScript configuration, state management libraries, and UI component libraries.
Performance optimization is a major deliverable. Tom analyzes and improves bundle sizes through code splitting, lazy loading, and tree-shaking. He addresses runtime performance by optimizing change detection cycles, leveraging OnPush change detection strategy, and minimizing DOM manipulations. His work on high-traffic platforms like Croissant, a workplace platform, and Websoul, which served 32,000+ businesses, has given him deep expertise in building fast, responsive applications.
Architectural refactoring is another critical area. This involves moving from monolithic, tightly-coupled applications to a more modular, component-based architecture. He helps implement feature-based organization, standalone components, and modern Angular concepts like signals for reactive state management. The goal is to create a codebase that is easier to understand, test, and extend by new team members.
Integrating Modern Development Practices
Modernization extends beyond the code to the entire software development lifecycle. Tom helps teams adopt AI-native development practices, integrating tools like AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to boost productivity. He sets up AI-assisted workflows for code generation, testing, and documentation, transforming the development process. This is part of his consulting offering on AI Software Factory setup.
He also focuses on developer experience (DevEx) and team upskilling. This includes improving CI/CD pipelines for faster feedback loops, establishing robust testing strategies with high coverage, and creating effective onboarding documentation. His background in technical writing and mentoring ensures knowledge is transferred and retained within your team. Workshops and corporate training are available to accelerate AI adoption and modern Angular practices.
Furthermore, Tom advocates for and implements modern design system integration. Drawing from his experience leading the Printify rebrand and design system ahead of its merger, he ensures that UI components are consistent, accessible, and easy for engineers to use. This not only improves the user interface but also drastically speeds up frontend development by providing a reusable, well-documented component library.
Proven Results Across Industries
Tom's track record speaks to his ability to deliver complex modernization projects. At Printify, he contributed to the design system and frontend architecture supporting over 10 million merchants and approximately 60 frontend engineers, a critical foundation for scalability. As a Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, he partnered directly with the CEO and CTO on compliance and collaboration features, demonstrating his capacity for technical leadership in a product-critical role.
His founder experience with Websoul, a marketing automation and fintech SaaS built with Vue, TypeScript, and Supabase, gives him unique insight into the challenges of scaling a product from zero. This hands-on experience with full-stack development, AG Grid for complex data tables, and performance optimization is directly applicable to Angular-based enterprise applications. He understands the trade-offs between speed of development and long-term maintainability.
His earlier work includes industrial ERP systems at Insoft Serwis and complex projects for clients like GE Healthcare, Unilever, and the Marshal Office of the Silesian Voivodeship. This diverse background across B2B SaaS, fintech, industrial tech, and public sector projects means he can quickly understand the unique domain constraints and regulatory requirements of your industry, whether it's data privacy in fintech or accessibility in government platforms.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your Angular modernization consultant is a strong fit if you are a founder, CTO, or technical lead of a product company with a legacy Angular application that is slowing down your team and limiting product growth. It is ideal if you need a staff-level engineer who can own the project from audit to production, provide clear technical leadership, and upskill your team in modern practices. This is particularly valuable for remote teams in the EU, UK, and US East Coast who need an experienced partner who can collaborate effectively across time zones and take initiative on complex technical challenges.