Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
anatoliybabushka.com
Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#2> For a few weeks one summer I woke at 4am to rewrite code my employer had already paid someone to write.
I mean, if you do it at 4am, you are sleep deprived by the day two and thus unable to stop yourself from something stupid.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#3> For a few weeks one summer I woke at 4am to rewrite code my employer had already paid someone to write. I mean, if you do it at 4am, you are sleep deprived by the day two and thus unable to stop yourself from something stupid.
Only if you do not get 7-8 hours of sleep ;)
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#4Engineer: but business is not my problem.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#5Is this news to anybody? Feels like I should just point AI and several “foundations of software engineering” and have it churn out blog posts for each chapter.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#6serving the engineer _does_ serve the business, ultimately.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#7This rings so very true. Have been in the software business for too many decades and having inherited other people's code many many times, there is always the decision about what to do going forward. Leave it running, refactor it gently or rip and replace. Each has it's own set of traps that need to be carefully considered.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#8A perennial insight which has been articulated many times before. This feels like one of those stages all engineers pass through at some point in their growth journey. Chesterton's Fence and all that (or Joel Spolsky's "never do full rewrites" advice).
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#9serving the engineer _does_ serve the business, ultimately.
Right? A codebase nobody wants to work on results in a crappy, broken product.
Re: Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
#10good rewrites are good. bad rewrites are bad.
you’ll only find out which kind of rewrite you’re doing once you start it.