Upgrading legacy systems without losing your sanity 🤯
·9 mins
Strategies that I’ve found helpful when performing a major technology upgrade.
#refactoring
Posts that deal with the subject of refactoring, or shows an example of a refactoring process.
(The book Refactoring is one of the books that shaped me.)
2025
Your first idea is probably bad 👎
Software is an evolving entity, not a finished product. You need to edit your code to improve.
Refactoring early returns to pattern matching 🔀
Early returns can be seen as a form of pattern matching.
2024
My pre-commit routine ✅
Check code committed to version control for quality, and the code base will thank you.
Same level of abstraction ⚖️
To make something easy to understand, its parts should be at the same level of abstraction.
Why write unit tests? 🧪
·18 mins
A deep dive into unit testing looking to answer why, how much, and what.
Remove temporal dependencies ⏰
How to avoid “temporal dependencies” where things must be done in a certain order.
2014
Convert guard clauses to value objects
How replacing validation functions with types can make your code safer and more expressive.
2012
Moving logic and data together [example]
An example of how moving logic and data together can result in a better design.
Don’t test private methods
The need to test a private method often indicates a new class waiting to get out.
Extract the logic (what’s left is glue)
To make code easier to understand and test, try to move complex logic away from code with many dependencies.
How to unit test code calling a static method
Don’t try to test code which calls static methods, try to get rid of the static methods.