How do you refactor personal projects?

Perhaps a better question is do you refactor personal projects?

I can see both sides of this.

Refactoring a personal project to incorporate new functionality is a good way to show off new skills. On the flip side, learning new skills may be a better use of your time.

Do you ever go back and rework old projects? What do you look for when refactoring?

Comments

[Ravavyr]

I mostly refactor things if i decide to go back and add a new feature or fix a bug i found. It usually goes something like "who wrote that crap? oh, right, me...i need to fix that" and then i spend two days cleaning stuff up and then finally adding the new feature :)

[Shannon Crabill]

Lol, I can relate to "who wrote this crap?"

[eranelbaz]

I do refactor my project,
most the refactor I do is when I need to add new features and I see the code that integrate with my new feature and I understand that my "now" knowledge is better than what I had so I do a little refactor,
What that helps my do all my refactor is thick layer of integration tests that tells me if I broke something

And I'm writing a new blog post about a half year refactor I did in one of my team products

[Adrien]

I do refactor my projects, principally because if you learn something new every day, some new framework or some new pattern and refactor your personal project is, I think, a great way to improve your understanding on those.

[Shannon Crabill]

Agreed!

[larswww]

When I want to add something new to my project, I take a close look at everything on display to the user, and focus on making sure what’s already there is working as well as it could.

I usually find that there’s stuff I’ve already done, which I haven’t done as well as I could :)

[tiso]

I do, for one of two reasons:

1. I want to upgrade code to my new/better skills.
2. I want to add some new feature (move project forward). You know, I have lot of projects in "it does something i want, but i have lot of features in mind to add there" state. Some of them i didn't touched for years. Now i have some time to move them forward - something like End of Year Resolution.

[Usman Suleiman]

Refactor my personal project?! Yes, I do that alot. Sometimes to convince myself it's better than writing tests for a personal project. 😅

[zakwillis]

Yes and no.
I only refractor when;

• something I did before needs enhancing and it becomes obvious it has become too complicated to extend/understand.
• I find myself repeating the same code. Some code will move to a utilities library or generic.

Often, it is more that if something wasn't developed fully, it is new code, so little refactoring occurs.

It is definitely the case there are some awful parts to my code, but typically they are fire and forget.

[Sylwia Vargas]

I decided to refactor my side project from April from bootcamp. It was the first time I did anything with Rails and CSS and it shows - CSS is a mess. I genuinely like the project so decided to give it a new life. I wrote a plan for myself and wrote about it here:
dev.to/sylwiavargas/refactoring-my...

I’ve been coding 10-75 minutes a day this holiday break. I see I’m learning a lot, also because I give myself space to go down the rabbit hole of docs and stack overflow threads :)

[Dominic Duffin]

I haven't yet, although there are a few things I would go back and refactor if I was going to work on them again.

[Corey McCarty]

It has only just now occurred to me that I don't even use my old projects. Personal projects have mostly been from school or while I was learning something.