[eloff]

Wait, that's an option in the probability space?

Actually once I was lucky enough to join a company where the code was written well, had good test coverage, the team implemented good code reviews, required tests on bug fixes and features, etc. The pandemic was the five hundred year storm to their leveraged business model (hospitality business targeting business travelers) and they folded within months.

At the next job I created the backend code from scratch and was the primary maintainer. I left it in pretty good shape with good test coverage. There were plenty of things I'd have done differently given the chance though. Hopefully the next guy doesn't curse me.

At the current job things are a mess again. I'm working on improving it. Git blame has me at having modified/added 8000 lines in the backend Python code since I joined three months ago. Slowly digging out of the hole as it caves in around me.

[nucleardog]

I started a job where two months in I assigned myself the task of cleaning up one of the major codebases. In the span of about three weeks I collected a bunch of metrics, parsed through a bunch of logs, customized some static analysis tools to fit in with a bunch of non-idiomatic stuff we were doing everywhere… and deleted most of the codebase.

For about a week my daily standup would be something along the lines of “I deleted 34,000 lines of code yesterday.”

In the end I think I threw away about 200k lines out of 350k.

In the span of the next few months I think we ended up identifying one method I’d removed that was still in use.

And qu’elle-surprise, the team’s velocity picked way up, people were suddenly way more willing to make bigger changes or even refactor, etc. People just really needed to get picked up out of the hole far enough that they could see the light and they ran with it from there.

It never became _good_ code, but it became much more manageable. Even if you can’t justify good code for the sake of good code, code good enough to actually be worked on is a must.