\nThe code base I work with is in a pretty bad state. Much better than it was a year ago, but that’s still faint praise. At times I can avoid thinking about it, especially when we’re focusing on some new piece of functionality that is mostly independent of the legacy code. Other times I have to wade through all this old muck to get something done. That really makes me want to clean up, go in with a big broom and sweep all the dirt away. Whenever we’re ahead of schedule I take a day or so to focus on refactoring.\n<\/p>\n
\nA day is a very short time to spend cleaning a big code base, so I want to make sure I spend it well. But the code is so messy that it’s hard to decide where to begin. It’s like when you have a house that hasn’t been cleaned for years: whichever part you start cleaning, something else grabs your attention because from another angle that looks even worse than the part you’re working on.\n<\/p>\n
\nDo I start from the parts I need to touch most often?
\nFrom the most important parts?
\nFrom the dirtiest parts?
\nFrom the parts where I can get the most done in the shortest time?
\nFrom the riskiest, most complex parts?\n<\/p>\n
\nEvery time I face this decision I make a different choice, but in general I tend to pick the first of these strategies. The files I need to work with regularly get cleaner, but there are many places that I have never even looked at, and I’m sort of hoping that I never will, although I’m sure the day will come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The code base I work with is in a pretty bad state. Much better than it was a year ago, but that’s still faint praise. At times I can avoid thinking about it, especially when we’re focusing on some new piece of functionality that is mostly independent of the legacy code. Other times I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[211,156,172],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeky_things","tag-legacy_code","tag-programming","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1363,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/1363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}