I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently working on a project that, all things considered, really shouldn’t be that difficult. A client wanted a change made to his web application, a change that is simple in concept and – in theory, at least – should be equally simple in execution.

But it isn’t, and it’s not because of any hidden complexity in the task itself. Rather, the problem is that the code base for the web application is, to put it bluntly and without a hint of hyperbole, awful. I’ve worked on a fair amount of legacy code on various projects, in various languages, over the last few years. This one is the worst.

Individual functions hundreds (perhaps thousands) of lines long. No comments. No object orientation to speak of. Hackish solutions to problems all over the place.

But this isn’t a complaint post. It’s a request to the thousands of people in the world who are tempted to say, “Well, this will work for now…” Some of you are developers yourselves; others are simply dabblers. Whoever you are, whatever your context, whatever your project: there is a problem with “This will work for now,” and that problem is called tomorrow. Read on, intrepid explorer →