How can the budget be tight when the code generates $20 million a year of revenue?
Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
491–500 of 704 posts
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also starting by fixing the js/css/html front end is likely the safest, as it wont corrupt any customer data & it will be visible when something breaks. That can probably be the next best candidate to do a major overhaul. I'd also hope that a $20M/year project can afford to hire someone senior in addition to these 3 juniors?
why would someone senior even want to join this team? Especially someone senior enough to fix this. The productivity is horrible and there's no kudos for fixing something that's lived for 12 years like this.
I was added to a team because, to quote the VP, "they're good but they need some adult supervision"
Mixing skill levels in a team is healthy.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#493[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#494First off, no, a full rewrite is not only not necessary, but probably the worst possible approach. Do a piece at a time. You will eventually have re-written all the code, but do not ever fall into the trap of a "full re-write". It doesn't work. But before you re-write once line of code - get some testing in place. Or, a lot of testing. If you have end-to-end tests that run through every feature that is currently used…
Basically every time I decided for a full rewrite I ended up thinking "thank god I made that decision, the new architecture is much simpler" (and no, it didn't just seem simpler to me).
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#495In a situation like this, a full rewrite is almost always tempting and almost always a bad idea.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#496Like several others have posted here you are in a great position to make some very simple changes that will have big results.
If you're looking for reading resources I found "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers to be very useful helping me build a plan. Yes it's an older book but that helped me appreciate this is not a new problem.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#497First off, no, a full rewrite is not only not necessary, but probably the worst possible approach. Do a piece at a time. You will eventually have re-written all the code, but do not ever fall into the trap of a "full re-write". It doesn't work. But before you re-write once line of code - get some testing in place. Or, a lot of testing. If you have end-to-end tests that run through every feature that is currently used…
> It doesn't work. That's simply not true. I've inherited something just as bad as this. We did a full rewrite and it was quite successful and the company went on to triple the revenue. > get some testing in place Writing tests for something that is already not functional, will be a waste of time. How do you fix the things that the test prove are broken? It is better to spend the time figuring out what all the featur…
> get some testing in place
What is really needed (and almost definitely doesn’t exist) is some kind of spec for the software.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#498It sounds like the person asking this question is about as junior as the team is (in choice of words, ideas about rewriting and best practices). It's hard to give specific advice without knowing more about the situation, for example what role the questioner has in the team. It is a tech lead, a boss, or a project lead?
So let's stick to advice that is universal to all roles and I think most people who have been in similar situations would agree with. First, let's be clear about one thing: This situation isn't the least bit unusual. From the facts above it doesn't look very bad. The team is small, and you can all gather in the same room and communicate. The fact that there is no framework and no patterns in place is good given the circumstances, awful codebases based on ancient frameworks and legacy patterns are generally an order of magnitude more work to understand.
Second, be humble towards the team and the problem. After such a long time, there's bound to be details that you don't know, and you have to find out about them sooner rather than later. People may seem resistant to change, but understand their angle and work with them. The likely want their codebase to improve, too, even if they see other problems as more pressing. It all depends on what your role is, and if you intent to help out with the actual work or not. But again, this is a small team with a shared goal.
Third, start with the lowest hanging fruit. Personal opinions come into play here, but I probably would look at operational issues early. Get monitoring in place. Test backups (yes, really). Some key metrics, both application wise (on some key processes such as login or payments) and operational (memory, open files, sockets). Learn about version control and start using it. Get proper test environments in place (including databases and mocked external integrations).
Good luck! Things are probably not as bad as you think. This type of work is really quite rewarding, because results are quickly very visible to everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#499> this code generates more than 20 million dollars a year of revenue From a business perspective, nothing is broken. In fact, they laid a golden goose. > team is 3 people, quite junior. One backend, one front, one iOS/android. Resistance to change is huge. My mistake, they didn't lay a golden goose--they built a money printer. The ROI here is insane. > productivity is abysmal which is understandable. The mess is just…
Only 3 developers maintaining a horrible codebase is a massive business risk. In this market, they could easily leave for better jobs within months of each other. Especially if they're junior and not company lifers. They money printer will print money until one day, it suddenly doesn't.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, there's a process. It's something that I've done a bunch of times for a bunch of clients. There's so much low-hanging fruit there that's so easy to fix _right now_. No version control? Good news! `git init` is free! PHPCS/PHP-CS-fixer can normalise a lot, and is generally pretty safe (especially when you have git now). Yeah, it's overwhelming, but OP said that the software is already making millions - you don't…
git init seems like job #1 because at least then you can delete every commented out line and start a little cleaner.
to loose all the comments? :D that would make it even harder to read