Chesteron’s Fence: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

this is a great analogy for coding, many such cases on codebases where code seems to do nothing but might be there for a reason

dev (not french) @ le /bleu @elefant. 


lebleuelefant.com

The first thing a new hire does often is wants to do is rewrite a whole thing. It’s because they don’t know what the fence supports yet

I will argue though- if you think it through, and can think of a better fence, sometimes *it is* worth it to build that fence in a new way. Just because there’s a gotcha doesn’t mean it’s not worth rebuilding

yep also bc it's much easier to rewrite your slop you only understand, than to try and understand what was build before you and why 😂💀