We really enjoyed this particular meetup that has all it needs to be worth attending and now listening to – juicy information, know-how, interaction, real-life situations, proven solutions. I was a pleasure to have Ben Bruda, tech lead and self-made developer, as speaker at Sibiu Web Meetup #24 about Pragmatic Refactoring told from his own experience. Not only was his story interesting, but we also related to most situations.
It sometimes happens that web applications look good, but the code behind doesn’t look so good. Code can be badly written because of various reasons; it’s either about not so experienced developers, low resources, no best practices in place, unhealthy company policies that do not include code review hours or learning time or seniors to supervise. Regardless the reason, if a new developer took up from where the former developer left it, it would be impossible for him or her to understand what the intention and the logic were.
Ben summed this up in such a powerful phrase: Disorder in code is technical debt. For the sake of a fast delivery, you sacrifice a cleanly written code and best practice, so on the long term, debts shall be paid. Experience tells us that resources like work, time, effort, money invested to repair code are often more costly than doing it properly from the very beginning, even including the time spent on learning.
Well, but when you find yourself in the situation above and run into code that was badly written, what do you?
Refactoring, that’s what you’ll do; and Ben, a self-made web developer, tells you everything you need to know about it in his presentation, so inspiringly named Pragmatic Refactoring – A jungle survivor manual. You will also learn of alternatives to refactoring and why to choose a solution over the other, what are the downsides and the advantages of each.
We appreciated that he emphasized the importance of supervision and mentors to be included in the software development projects. As a company we really related to Ben’s approach: encourage and believe in juniors’ talent, stick up to best practices, consult mentors, as junior have your code supervised, test. All this prepares the app for scalability early on and avoids down time later and resources wasted with corrections.
The interventions from the public are also very valuable in this meetup. Enjoy it all in the video!
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