l0rn

Hello HN,

just wanted to put this discussion out there again to help me (and potentially others) to get a more professional judgement of crufty software projects.

I think "This codebase is bad, I could do it better from scratch" is a thought most of us had sometimes in our professional carreer, ironically more often as a young inexperienced programmer than later in your career. I guess that comes with a better understanding of the vast complexity of a software project, the respect for value-producing software in production and a less ignorant assessment of your own abilities. Now I am much more reserved to propose a rewrite. However I recently adopted a codebase (and a team) that made me think: When is a legitimate point reached where a rewrite would be actually justified? I worked with it 3 months now and realize:

* There is a substantial amount of Hotfixes from apparently inexperienced programmers (mutable global state, arbitrary waiting statements to battle race conditions) * There is some business requirements that became obsolete (abandoned views, commented out code with no explanation) * A whole bunch of skipped test suites * Two outdated libraries, each of which would demand a very substantial refactoring (vue2 with class decorators -> vue3, dropping of vuex as global application storage) * Generally a missing pattern on how to organize API access, it's pretty much all over the place

What I'd like to hear of the experienced people in this community: Did any of you faced a similar situation with a bad codebase? Which steps path did you go? Rewrite or itearative refactor? How did it go? In retrospect, was it a sane decision? Have you been able to identify markers, or a threshold were rewriting were actually the better decision?

Happy new year to everyone and thanks ahead!

I have a small (6 people), but very talented team of friends who develop software for a living. We're doing this full-time and already have some engagements that make sure our salaries get paid. Nevertheless I have the feeling we are underselling ourselves, mainly because of us having a hard time to do proper acquisition. We found out that getting projects as an agency seems to be a lot harder than being hired as a freelancer. There are tons of portals that practically overflow with offers. I never had a problem getting a job as a freelance dev. Does anyone here on HN has experience how to effectively advertise a small software agency and acquire good contracts? I also would be pleased by any information where these kinda deals happen in your country as we basically can work for any client speaking German, English or Spanish.