The great red dragon and the novice programmer

As a novice software developer at some point of time you will find enlightenment. You will understand what is the source of Power. Power of perfect code development. Power of ideal expression ideas to text. SOLID and clean, intentional and free of any accidental complexity.

You will desire that Power. Like the Pilgrim admired the power of The Great Red Dragon. But still you need a transformation. Pilgrim needed his victims to see his beauty, as he himself admired the Red Dragon. You will instead look at code you work with. The real code. Ugly. Legacy. Half year old code written on 2 releases backward Spring version. You will show your vict... sorry, colleagues that bad code. And yourself as a powerful Red Dragon. But... You're not yet him.

You need your transformation. I was there too. Now I know. Please keep in mind one thing. Consult your more experienced colleagues before you start making that code better. Example from my transformation. I spent some time years ago to refactor piece of code using collection to keep objects of various classes. Then cascade of instanceOf... This was looking for me as an unacceptable implementation. Unfortunately, my employer would have been more happy if I had focused on my tasks instead of refactoring code that was correctly working since years. From his perspective my hard work was not considered as productive. Now I know I just was not able to recognize which part of system needs what kind of refactoring.

Here I must refer to Procent's excellent talk with Jarek Palka (in Polish). You can find out a lot of important hints regarding working with legacy code. Which is code you have just commited. One of hints is why compulsive refactoring may affect your projects and may cause inability to deliver.

After years I learnt that system I was working with was actually quite good thanks to good design and correct, efficient, event driven architecture. As a young developer, influenced by Clean-Code evangelism, I was focused on local parts, not on wider scope. Lot of implementation details were given to novice programmers and far from ideal. They SHOULD be better, but system was good enough to resist local code ugliness. Please try to learn what is important in your system first, before you start assuming that whoever wrote some piece of code was an ignorant or does not even know the programming language. Remember you have not yet transformed into The Great Red Dragon.