Evolving Legacy at Scale. The Artisan of the Day Is Sara Bine.
Sara Bine’s first encounter with programming wasn’t through a textbook or a formal class: it was in a RuneScape IRC chatroom in 2006. She was captivated by chat bots that greeted users by name and responded to commands, and she wanted to learn how they worked.
That curiosity led her to PHP, regex parsing of Google pages (she now laughs at the memory), and eventually, a career in software development.
While studying Spanish in college, Sara helped a friend with a programming assignment and realized she could make a career out of it. Her first professional role was at a small iOS game development shop as the sole “PHP person” and server administrator, where she built vanilla PHP APIs for mobile apps and managed AWS servers with little guidance.
That trial by fire set the tone for a career spent navigating and improving legacy systems.
Discovering Laravel and Transforming Systems
Sara’s next role came via Craigslist. She worked at a hardware store that was transitioning to e-commerce. She inherited a CodeIgniter app, discovered Laravel, and received sponsorship to Laracon 2014. She led a full migration from CodeIgniter to Laravel, rewriting critical features from Magento into modern Laravel apps that staff and dropshippers relied on daily.
She later joined a CRM team for higher education, where a fresh Laravel install rapidly grew into a sprawling, complex legacy application. This experience sharpened her understanding of technical debt, premature abstraction, and the realities of working in large teams.
Legacy Rescue and Mentorship at Tighten
Sara spent five years at Tighten, where she tackled a wide range of projects: rescuing legacy PHP systems, migrating apps to Laravel, building greenfield features, developing mobile app backends, and even working in React Native. This variety reinforced Laravel’s strengths: rapid prototyping without excessive technical debt.
At Tighten, she also mentored other developers, contributed to learning initiatives, and took on advising and consulting roles, sharing her expertise on architecture, migrations, and sustainable codebases.
She’s also attended multiple Laracons, making her a long-time and deeply engaged member of the ecosystem.
Migrating BetterHelp to Laravel
Today, Sara works on the Platform team at BetterHelp, leading the charge in converting a large vanilla PHP application to Laravel. Her team focuses on application and developer experience: building stable, maintainable, and adaptable systems.
Their approach is measured and strategic. After gradually introducing Illuminate components into their existing codebase, they’re now migrating feature by feature, setting up new routes for Laravel-powered sections while using a fallback route to pass all other requests to the legacy PHP app. “There’s a great write-up explaining how to do it,” she says, pointing to this blog post.
The frontend has gone through a similar evolution: from Twig, jQuery, and Bootstrap to Next.js and Tailwind, laying the groundwork for a more modern full-stack architecture. “I can't wait to start benefiting from the full range of Laravel API features on the backend next!” she says.
Full-Circle: Laravel at Home
Outside of work, Sara has fully automated her home using Home Assistant and a self-hosted Laravel app.
From vacuuming routines triggered by opening her office door to automated dog feeding logs and meeting lights, her hobby projects echo her professional journey: using Laravel to bring structure, integration, and elegance to complex systems.
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