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by tikiman163 1359 days ago
I primarily agree with you, but his primary point is mainly regarding the tendency for projects at large organizations to have a substantial number of unfished attempts to rework existing applications, which often results in serious headaches for whoever owns the code.

What I mean is that even if you've followed a specific set of programming principals, code practices and design patterns consistently across the life time of the application, there will still have been initiatives to change how things are done. Maybe they want to use a "better" authentication library, or add a material framework that has capabilities they need. The exact initiative, and how valid the request or decision is doesn't matter. These initiatives may occur one at a time, or be competing with each other for priority while being incompatible without anyone noticing. But some of them will fail to be completed, and someone has to back out the changes that shouldn't go to prod. Inevitably something will get left behind. Over 5-10 years this can have a shockingly large impact on the code base in ways engineers frequently notice but don't understand how the code got to the state its in.

This frequently means dead code, unused dependencies, comments that don't make any sense, properties on objects that are never displayed or referenced by business logic, and multiple classes/services which accept the same inputs and produce the same outputs but do the job just differently enough you can't be sure it's the same. That, and over abstractions (any piece of code which branches based on the context of "who's asking").

And frankly few things any me more than someone who felt the need to implement their own logging implementation, especially in C# (yes I know we're talking about React, but people do the same stupid crap in that case as well). Reinventing the wheel has to be done on occasion, but you need to ask yourself if it has to be you that makes it happen,and whether it already has been.