But you should probably touch it before all the dependencies are outdated. And before everyone who understands how to work with it has left. Especially if it happens to be core to the business.
:)
I completely agree. I think “touching” is the right word. Don’t rebuild it, update as needed and get familiar (if needed)
had to completely replace a component in a massive project at my work recently because we forgor how it worked and had a newer different thing for it. it was so intertwined into that project that I practically had to do a ship of Theseus on it 😭😭😭😭
Why would you touch your job security?
Absolutely untrue. Keep your shit up to date. If you have time, simplify code.
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looks at the startup scripts I just took from a 2h runtime to 15m
Guess I gotta revert those changes.
I mean, runtimes can be a legit reason to say something’s not working.
But it does work. Eventually.
Really, I fixed it because we’re doing an OS upgrade and I didn’t want to wait 2h every time I spun up a new instance to test a change.
that’s the problem with the ‘its working’ argument.
if you hadn’t touched the working code you might have missed the performance issue to begin with.
That’s a good way of maximizing technical debt.
Well over a decade ago I remember a coworker would just go through the codebase and add his own coding style.
Instead of
if (predicate) {He would do
if ( predicate )I would always ask why he did it and he said, “well we don’t have any coding standards so I’m going to do it” … I replied, “there’s things like unwritten rules and sticking to whatever’s in the codebase makes it easy”. I told the seniors and they chose not to do anything (everyone just merged into trunk) and they just left him for a while.
Then he turned rewrote built-in logical functions in code like this:
if (predicate || predicate) {Into code like this:
if ( or( predicate, predicate ) ) {This was C# and there was no Prettier back then.
Also, he would private every constructor and then create a static factory method.
Eventually the seniors told him to knock it off. All I said was that I initially tried telling them weeks ahead of time and now we got a mess on our hands.
Hilarious but their fault for not making a standard. The guy was just taking the initiative.
The best part is that his “or” function changes the semantics of the code in a subtle and hard to find way. :D
This is actually not a good advice, from my experience. If we don’t monitor, refactor, or improve the code, the software will rot, sooner or later. “Don’t touch” doesn’t mean we don’t ever think about the code, but we make the conscious choice not to modify it.
Yeah, I’ve worked with the leave it alone types. What do you get in return? Components of your system which haven’t been updated in the last 20 years and still run .NET 3.5. They obviously never stopped working, but you have security concerns, worse performance (didn’t matter much in that case) and when you actually need to touch them you’re fucked.
Why? Because updating takes a lot of time (as things break with every major revision) and on top of that if you then decide not to update (yeah, same coworker…) then you have to code around age old standards and run into bugs that you can’t even find on Stack Overflow, because people didn’t have to solve those in the last 20 years.
if it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid, and you’ve been lucky this far.
Or you do the right thing re-write or refactor, apply the latest practice add some tests to it. This way you won’t have a black box anymore. Who knows there might be a hidden bug there that might be a huge security issue and could bite you back in the future.
i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );
// what the fuck?
Fast inverse square root?
“That sign can’t stop me because I can’t read!”
Fix it til it breaks.
If you know it works, you also know it well enough to touch it.
Almost everybody that says it is talking about something that doesn’t work, and they don’t know it.
And those two add-up to make any advice completely useless.
Not useless at all, this is why there is so much shit code out there.
It full implies, document and test your fucking code people!
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At least untill you refactor something, and the act of refactoring, even though it shouldn’t logically cause any problems, causes everything to break.
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Though usually not long after that point you start to ask yourself “Why the fuck did I get myself into this mess”
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flipside: it needs to be fixed but the only person who understands it is OOO
