villainy@lemmy.world
on 25 Feb 2026 22:44
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You’ve inherited a 300k lines of spaghetti code. What do you do now?
Quit.
NGL this Mikado Method sounds pretty good 😉
HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
on 02 Mar 2026 05:30
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You’ve inherited a 300k lines of spaghetti code. What do you do now?
Quit.
The grain of truth in this is that organizations which have accumulated a lot of technical debt tend to continue to be organizations which accumulate a lot of technical debt.
Let’s say you take a new student job as a kitchen helper in a restaurant, and on day one, you learn that people there don’t really wash the dishes - they just make them look somehow clean.
Do you walk to your boss and tell him: “Hey boss, I got an idea, we could wash our dishes, what do you think?”
It is different if you have more of a say, as in, you are the chef. You could leverage that good chefs are hard to find. You could point at customer reviews with complaints.
But as an apprentice, I would advise to look for a better kitchen. Especially since tidying up 300 k lines of spaghetti code will take many person-years.
thenextguy@lemmy.world
on 26 Feb 2026 00:43
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I’m not a tdd guy, but I would reach for tests first. You don’t know the code yet. Testing is the only way to stay sane. And writing the tests if they don’t exist yet will help you learn the code.
kibiz0r@midwest.social
on 26 Feb 2026 01:14
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Yes, but you do need to be careful with what level you test at. Too high level and the tests may be slow, flaky, and difficult to focus onto small details. Too low level and they may just bake-in the existing implementation.
thenextguy@lemmy.world
on 26 Feb 2026 01:45
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That was such a huge problem on my last job. Most of the unit tests just executed the code and didn’t really test anything and any time you changed the implementation everything broke.
Thankfully it was truly my last job. 😊
HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
on 26 Feb 2026 05:55
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The thing is… to test such code, you often need to modify it first.
You see the problem?
thenextguy@lemmy.world
on 26 Feb 2026 15:29
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By the way, I am currently working on a 20 year old code base that was in production use all the years and was continuously adapted. At least the people who wrote this were (more or less) knowing what they were doing.
I guess I should ask for a pay rise…
threaded - newest
NGL this Mikado Method sounds pretty good 😉
The grain of truth in this is that organizations which have accumulated a lot of technical debt tend to continue to be organizations which accumulate a lot of technical debt.
Let’s say you take a new student job as a kitchen helper in a restaurant, and on day one, you learn that people there don’t really wash the dishes - they just make them look somehow clean.
Do you walk to your boss and tell him: “Hey boss, I got an idea, we could wash our dishes, what do you think?”
It is different if you have more of a say, as in, you are the chef. You could leverage that good chefs are hard to find. You could point at customer reviews with complaints.
But as an apprentice, I would advise to look for a better kitchen. Especially since tidying up 300 k lines of spaghetti code will take many person-years.
I’m not a tdd guy, but I would reach for tests first. You don’t know the code yet. Testing is the only way to stay sane. And writing the tests if they don’t exist yet will help you learn the code.
Yes, but you do need to be careful with what level you test at. Too high level and the tests may be slow, flaky, and difficult to focus onto small details. Too low level and they may just bake-in the existing implementation.
That was such a huge problem on my last job. Most of the unit tests just executed the code and didn’t really test anything and any time you changed the implementation everything broke.
Thankfully it was truly my last job. 😊
The thing is… to test such code, you often need to modify it first.
You see the problem?
No. I don’t grant your premise.
I think this is compatible with TDD. It's just fancy divide-and-conquer.
The Mikado Method, eh?
(All together) Three junior devs at work are we,
Busy and harried as devs can be,
Compiler warnings flowing freely,
Three junior devs at work!
(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)
(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)
(Carlos) Don’t touch our “World’s Best Coder” mugs! (Laughter)
(All together) Three junior devs at work!
You have to imagine Alice, Bob, and Carlos 25 years later, working on production code that was created like this.
XKCD on this: m.xkcd.com/2730/
By the way, I am currently working on a 20 year old code base that was in production use all the years and was continuously adapted. At least the people who wrote this were (more or less) knowing what they were doing. I guess I should ask for a pay rise…