You might be thinking of this excellent article by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

(Ironically, that post is about Netscape and the rewrite, Mozilla, ended up growing as a nonprofit far beyond Netscape's original scale.)

The so-risky-it's-almost-certain-to-fail approach is a big bang rewrite. Stop the world until the rewrite is done.

That's not what we're doing. A tiny bit of our GraphQL schema is _already_ running in production atop new services written in Go. We're going to do this step-by-step, while keeping the site running, _and_ adding committed features next year.

It's still a huge investment and comes with risks, but it's an incremental process and we'll be able to track the progress at every step.