As soon as a developer writes one line of code, it needs to be dealt with later. It either gets deleted or maintained.
In case it gets maintained, a developer gets confronted with it later, time and time again. It could be you, it could be your (future) colleague.
We now understand that choices we make today will impact the quality of the system and the project later. The better we make these choices, the less technical debt we incur.
Often we know we could do better, when more time or budget would have been provided. We cut corners.
Each time we see bad (or less optimal) code we get the urge to improve it. At least I do. If the application is bad, the urge is huge. If the application is horrendous the urge is getting even painful.
My question is, is this anxiety healthy? I reckon, no form of anxiety is healthy and being exposed to such technical debt each day is very unhealthy.
If I see such bad code I want to change it. I want to change it now, until it is out of my sight. But I can't. Do you relate?
Top comments (1)
I think having a technical debt in any code base is common but the main concern is how you deal with it. As you mentioned once you start delaying that, it becomes more painful. So if you don't change it now, it might never happen later.