Tom Smykowski is a Poland-based remote Staff Software Engineer specializing in legacy frontend modernization for EU, UK, and US teams. With nearly two decades of product delivery experience blending engineering, UX, and product thinking, he is the ideal partner for CTOs, founders, and executives seeking to transform outdated, monolithic frontend architectures into modern, scalable, and maintainable systems. His work focuses on taking ownership from discovery through production, ensuring modernization projects deliver tangible business value through improved performance, developer experience, and user satisfaction.
The Critical Need for Frontend Modernization
Legacy frontend codebases, often built with outdated frameworks, tangled dependencies, and minimal tooling, become a significant drag on business agility. They slow down feature development, increase bug rates, and make hiring and onboarding new engineers a costly challenge. Modernization is not merely a technical upgrade, it is a strategic business initiative to reduce operational risk, accelerate time-to-market, and improve product quality.
Successful modernization requires more than just swapping libraries. It demands a deep understanding of the existing system's business logic, user flows, and technical debt. Tom approaches each project with a product mindset, first identifying the core user and business goals trapped within the legacy system. This ensures the modernization effort prioritizes value delivery, whether it's enabling a new product feature for Printify's 10M+ merchants or ensuring compliance and collaboration tools at Croissant function reliably.
Without a structured approach, modernization projects can fail, leaving teams with a partially migrated system that is more complex than the original. Tom mitigates this risk by employing incremental migration strategies, establishing clear metrics for success, and ensuring strong communication with all stakeholders throughout the process.
A Proven Methodology for Incremental Migration
Tom employs a pragmatic, incremental methodology to de-risk legacy frontend modernization. The goal is to achieve continuous improvement without halting feature development for the core product. This often involves creating a parallel, modernized environment where new features can be built while systematically refactoring and migrating existing functionality.
Key techniques in this methodology include the Strangler Fig pattern, where new code is developed in a modern framework (like Vue.js or React) and gradually replaces parts of the old monolith. He also leverages module federation and micro-frontend architectures where appropriate, as seen in his work on large-scale design systems. This allows different teams to develop and deploy features independently, a crucial advantage for organizations like Printify with around 60 frontend engineers.
This approach requires robust tooling and automation. Tom integrates modern CI/CD pipelines, comprehensive test suites (including visual regression testing for design systems), and AI-assisted code analysis to ensure quality and consistency. The result is a controlled, predictable migration that delivers value at every step, maintaining stakeholder confidence and team momentum.
Technical Expertise Across the Modern Stack
Tom's technical expertise spans the frameworks and tools essential for a successful modernization. He has deep hands-on experience with Vue.js and TypeScript, having founded Websoul, a fintech SaaS serving 32,000+ businesses. He is equally proficient in Angular and React ecosystems, enabling him to choose the right tool for the project's specific needs and team skillset.
His work extends beyond the frontend framework to the entire toolchain. This includes migrations from legacy module bundlers like Webpack to modern alternatives such as Vite for drastically improved build performance and developer experience. He architects scalable state management solutions, implements robust design systems to ensure UI consistency and accessibility, and integrates with modern backend APIs and services.
For data-intensive applications, he leverages powerful libraries like AG Grid. His full-stack capabilities, including experience with Supabase and Node.js, allow him to understand and optimize the entire data flow, ensuring the modernized frontend performs efficiently and reliably at scale.
Driving Business Outcomes Through Engineering
The ultimate measure of a successful modernization is business impact. Tom's projects consistently focus on key outcomes: increased development velocity, reduced operational costs, and enhanced user experience. At Printify, modernizing the design system and rebranding ahead of a major merger was a strategic business move, not just a technical task. It unified the product experience for millions of users.
His role as a Staff Software Engineer at Croissant involved direct partnership with the CEO and CTO, focusing on compliance and collaboration features critical to the platform's core value proposition. This product-centric engineering ensures that technical decisions are aligned with business goals, whether for enterprise clients like GE Healthcare and Unilever or for public-sector projects for the Polish Tourism Organisation and Silesian University of Technology.
By improving developer experience through modern tooling and clean architecture, he helps teams ship features faster and with higher quality. This translates directly to competitive advantage, allowing businesses to respond more quickly to market opportunities and user feedback.
Remote Collaboration with Global Teams
Based in Poland, Tom specializes in remote, asynchronous collaboration with teams across EU, UK, and US time zones. His communication style is built on clarity and proactive knowledge sharing, honed through technical writing, public speaking, and workshop facilitation. This makes him exceptionally effective in distributed environments where clear documentation and async updates are vital.
He seamlessly integrates into existing engineering workflows, using tools like Calendly for scheduling and maintaining overlap with US East Coast hours when required. His experience includes occasional on-site workshops, client visits, and team offsites, providing the necessary in-person collaboration for key project phases while maintaining the efficiency of a remote-first model.
This remote expertise is particularly valuable for modernization projects, which often require deep focus and minimal disruption to the core team's daily rhythm. He can lead the technical strategy and execution while keeping stakeholders informed through regular updates, demos, and detailed reports.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom for legacy frontend modernization is ideal if you are a founder, CTO, or technical lead at a company with a growing product hampered by an aging frontend. It fits teams planning a major version upgrade, a framework migration (e.g., AngularJS to modern Angular or React), or a shift to a micro-frontend architecture. It is also a strong match for organizations needing to build or overhaul a design system to improve consistency and velocity across multiple engineering teams. If your goal is to reduce technical debt, empower your developers, and deliver a better product faster, this collaboration will drive those results.