Within you are many wolves writing code

One wants to implement this feature to the best of your standards, regardless of the surrounding code. Another aims to fit in with the standards of the existing code, as it is. Still another hopes to write it so that it’s easy to delete and rewrite it again later when more is known about how it should actually work. Still another just wants to get it done. They’re not wrong, but none of them are right. There’s one mistake I see more often than anything else, and it’s absolutely deadly: ignoring the rest of the codebase and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing codebase in order to keep your nice clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it! In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible, in order to maintain consistency. – Sean Goedecke, Mistakes Engineers Make in Large…