Development
The code I no longer understand
I wrote it myself. A few months later, I needed a guide to read it.
There's a particular kind of embarrassment software developers encounter.
You open an old project.
Find a two-hundred-line function.
Read the variables, conditions and comments.
And wonder: who wrote this?
Git history has an answer.
You did.
Wonderful. 😂
Code is a conversation with your future self
When you build a feature, its logic feels obvious.
You know why that condition exists. You remember the unusual customer requirement. You understand the vaguely named variable.
Then you move on.
Months later, those details have left your memory.
The code becomes the only surviving trace of your reasoning.
If it's hard to follow, even a small fix requires investigation.
The problem with small shortcuts
Technical debt doesn't always begin with a dramatic mistake.
Sometimes it's a validation rule copied into three controllers.
A function with a vague name.
A business rule hidden deep inside a query.
A temporary workaround that never gets revisited.
Each decision seems tolerable alone.
Then they accumulate.
One day, changing a status in one screen breaks something elsewhere.
You start hesitating to touch the code.
That isn't a good sign.
Documentation isn't a substitute for clarity
The obvious answer is documentation.
Yes, but useful documentation.
A comment that simply repeats the next line adds little.
An explanation of why an unusual decision was made can be invaluable.
A small README describing how to run the project, required environment variables and where key business rules live may be worth more than a giant document nobody updates.
Tests serve another purpose.
They don't just show what code does today. They show what it should keep doing tomorrow.
What I try to do instead
When a project becomes hard to understand, I prefer a gradual approach.
First, identify the behaviour that matters.
Then add or improve tests around essential cases.
Only after that do I simplify naming, split responsibilities and remove painful duplication.
It isn't dramatic.
But it's safer than rewriting everything just to enjoy a cleaner-looking repository.
The big rewrite temptation
Old code practically begs for a fresh start.
New framework. New architecture. New folders.
Everything neat again.
But the existing system may contain years of business rules and exceptions discovered the hard way.
A total rewrite can lose useful behaviour nobody thought to document.
Sometimes the less heroic solution is better: improve one section at a time.
What about AI?
Coding assistants make it possible to generate software quickly.
They can also produce structures we accept without really understanding.
The risk isn't that AI writes code differently.
It's accumulating thousands of lines nobody can confidently maintain.
I explore that in Coding by instinct?.
The real quality test
Good code isn't only code that works today.
It's code people can understand, fix and improve later.
I'd like whoever opens my project in six months to understand my intentions.
Even if that person is me.
Especially if it's me. 😅
