Alright, let’s talk about a real mess I had to deal with a while back. This project landed on my lap after the previous guy just vanished. Poof. Gone. And the code? Oh boy. It was like someone spilled spaghetti everywhere.
We needed to add a new feature, something simple on the surface. But touching anything in that codebase felt like playing Jenga during an earthquake. Every time I tried to understand a piece, five other things would look like they might break.
Getting Started Felt Impossible
I remember someone, maybe it was during a late-night coding session fueled by bad coffee, mentioned looking up stuff by Bill Higgins. Said he talked a lot about cleaning up code, refactoring, that kind of thing. Sounded good in theory, right? Make things neat. So, I thought, why not? Can’t get much worse.
I started small. Found this one monster function that did about ten different things. I tried that ‘Extract Method’ idea. Just pulling out a small chunk of logic into its own function. Seemed simple enough.
- First, I spent hours just tracing what the heck this small chunk actually did.
- Then, I carefully copied it into a new function.
- Made sure all the variables lined up.
- Replaced the original chunk with a call to my new function.
- Prayed it still worked.
The Reality Check
Did it work? Yeah, mostly. After fixing a couple of stupid mistakes I made. But the pushback was instant. My team lead was like, “Why are you wasting time moving code around? Just add the new feature!” He didn’t get that adding the feature without doing this first was asking for trouble. It took actual arguments to explain that untangling this mess wasn’t just ‘tidying up’, it was necessary to even move forward.
I kept chipping away at it, bit by bit. Found another spot where I could simplify some crazy nested ‘if’ statements. Used another technique, can’t remember the fancy name Higgins probably had for it. Just made sense to break it down.
It wasn’t some magic fix. The whole system was still shaky. But that one area? It became slightly less terrifying to look at. You could actually read it without getting a headache. We managed to bolt on the new feature without setting the whole thing on fire, which felt like a huge win at the time.
So, what did I learn? Those ideas from guys like Bill Higgins are great on paper. Really smart. But getting them done in a real project, with deadlines breathing down your neck and teammates who think refactoring is a waste of time? That’s the real challenge. It’s less about knowing the patterns and more about fighting the battles to actually implement them. Sometimes you win small, sometimes you just make a tiny dent. Better than nothing, I guess.
