⚡ "140+ components. Two weeks. Easy." That's what I told my team before upgrading our app from Angular v13 to v19. I was wrong. And it wasn't even close. I was the sole developer on this migration. First time doing one this big. My approach: version by version. No skipping. Here's what I wish someone told me before I started. ◆ Every version will break you differently. v12 → v13: Aligned Material with the rest of the stack. Minor icon issues. Manageable. v13 → v14: Smooth. I got confident. v14 → v15: That confidence died. Legacy components broke my tables, expansion panels, and layouts. v15 → v16: Customized pipes. More on that below. v16 → v17: The big one. MDC migration. Entire UI — gone. v17 → v18 → v19: Pushed through with a broken interface. Every day felt wrong. But I kept going. ◆ Deprecated libraries won't wait for you. During v15 → v16, the ng2-search-filter got deprecated. No compatible version available. I replaced it with a custom-built filter from scratch. ◆ Fix by category, not by component. By v19, the app worked under the hood. Visually? Unrecognizable. 140+ components needed fixing. I called my manager. We discussed the approach — instead of fixing one component at a time, I grouped them by type. All tables together. All cards together. All expansion panels together. Global fix per category. That single decision saved me weeks. Two sprints later, UI fully restored. ◆ The upgrade guide is a starting point, not a roadmap. Angular's official update guide got me maybe 70% of the way. The other 30%? Misaligned dependencies, dead libraries, tech debt no guide could predict. Budget 30% more time than your best estimate. Then add a little more. ⎯⎯⎯ The migration was harder than anything I estimated. But the app we ended up with — faster, cleaner, and something I'm genuinely proud to maintain. If you're about to start a major migration solo, your timeline is wrong. That's okay. Push through it anyway. #Angular #JavaScript #WebDevelopment #FullStackDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering
"Fix by category, not by component” that alone is gold. Thanks for sharing such a real migration experience!
This perfectly captures the reality .Upgrade guides get you started, but experience gets you through it!