Clearing six years of Ember debt on a live trading platform
sFOX is the crypto prime dealer for institutional investors, aggregating liquidity from more than 80 markets through a single interface. With over $600 billion in transaction volume, their platform serves hedge funds and institutional traders who need reliable, high-performance infrastructure. When their Ember.js codebase accumulated deprecations that threatened maintainability, they needed specialised expertise to clean it up without disrupting live trading.
Visit sFOX
- Industry
- Crypto / Institutional fintech
- Duration
- 10 months
- Location
- WY, USA
The area of improvement
sFOX’s trading dashboard runs on Ember.js, a framework that requires regular maintenance as the ecosystem evolves. Their codebase had accumulated deprecation warnings from outdated patterns and components. Left unaddressed, these would eventually break with future Ember updates.
The constraint made it harder than a normal cleanup. This is a platform handling billions in institutional trades, so the technical debt had to be removed systematically while the service stayed up throughout.
Deprecation cleanup
We identified and resolved deprecated patterns throughout the codebase. Component lifecycle hooks were updated, legacy APIs removed, and Ember Data usage modernised to align with current best practices.
Deprecations are warnings today and breakages tomorrow. Clearing them is unglamorous work that buys the option to upgrade later, which is exactly the work that gets deferred until a framework version goes end of life and the upgrade becomes a rewrite.
Version upgrade readiness
We prepared the codebase for smooth upgrades by eliminating deprecated code paths, so future Ember updates can be applied without breaking changes.
Testing framework
We added test coverage for critical trading components and validated that the deprecation fixes introduced no regressions in the trading workflow.
On a platform where a frontend regression can cost a customer money, the tests are not a formality. They are the only way to prove that a large mechanical change did not alter behaviour.
Zero downtime
All updates deployed without service interruption. Institutional traders continued operating throughout the ten month engagement.
Scope
This was a focused engagement rather than an open-ended one. sFOX’s engineering team led the technical decisions and we executed the task-oriented work, exactly as scoped. The Ember.js codebase came out free of deprecation warnings and ready for future version upgrades, with test coverage that supports ongoing maintenance.
Screens
Client feedback
I would recommend his work for projects that are detailed and task oriented.
AALA did good work when helping out cleaning up the deprecations in our Ember.js code base. He was able to work quickly and accomplish tasks fast. Developer did struggle a bit when it came to more complicated pieces of the code base and doing more manual testing, which is understandable for a framework that isn't super common.
Bryan RoblesDirector of Engineering, sFOX
What next
Running something like this?
The engineers who built this are the ones you would work with. Tell us what you have and we will tell you plainly whether it is work we should take.