[jerf]

I like a lot of your other replies. I also have a philosophy of doing net improvement every time I go in. If you put a little bit of elbow grease in every time, the net effect on your code over months is pretty nice.

But you also have to understand and internalize that it's OK to do a little bit of improvement each time. You don't have to go in, pick up a piece of code, sigh dramatically, and fix everything you can see about it. Just fix a bit. Turn some strings into enumerations or a custom type. Turn a recurring series of arguments into a single struct. Rename a deceptively-name parameter or function variable into something correct and meaningful. Add a test case for what you just did, or add a test case for something even related to what you just did that was not previously covered. Even just one of those is a good thing. Don't give in to the temptation to throw a 15th parameter on to a function and add another crappy if statement in to the pile of the god function. Don't fix the god function all at once, just take a bit back out of it.

If every interaction on the code base is net positive, even just a bit, over time it does slowly get nicer, and if you greenfield something with this attitude, it tends to stay pretty nice. Not necessarily pristine. Not necessarily nice in every last corner. But pretty nice. And if you do need to take out some technical debt, you'll have the metaphorical capital with which to do it; a non-trivial part of the reason why technical debt has such a bad rap is that it is taken out on code bases already bereft of technical capital, which means you're on the really bad part of the compounding costs curve to start with.