Software engineering, as a profession, is terrible at refactoring. A hot-take I know, but I think I can convince you. After writing about [skill acquisition and up-skilling](https://barryosull.com/blog/growing-other-developers-as-a-staff-engineer/) I wanted to reflect on refactoring, a skill that is core to software development, many dev assume they have, but few can actually demonstrate. # My journey with refactoring First a little about myself. For the last 7 years I chose to specialise in legacy web apps (which baffled so many people), and rather than pitching rewrites that typically fail, I opted to focus on improving these sys...
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Do you work with Legacy code? You probably do and don't realise it. IMO, if the code is over 5 years old, messy and it makes money, then it's probably legacy. Legacy code is tricky, and most of us try to avoid it, moving onto sexy new ideas and projects as time moves on. This means that we never learn to deal with legacy, and all the while, the codebase is chugging along, getting worse and increasingly expensive to change. If we don't learn to deal with legacy code, then we'll never learn how to maintain systems over time. We need to address this. That's where this article comes in, it is a collection of my notes from reading and a...
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Let's talk software architecture. Most of us know [MVC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller), it's the foundation for pretty much every web framework. As your product grows though, problems with MVC will start to appear. Even a relatively simple product can end up with a bloated and messy codebase. MVC is where we start, but what do you do when you need to evolve past it? Before we go further, let's examine why we have so much trouble explaining the answer. Here's a common conversation (for developers anyway) - devA: "Our codebase is really messy, how do we clean it up?" - devB: "We need to refacto...
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