This is my career right now. I work in a small dev shop that has been around for a long time, but I'm relatively new. I've worked on a number of projects and this keeps coming up. Every time I open a project and start working I find myself handcuffed by the exact scenario you describe here.
For a developer it can be brutal to work with this kind of codebase. I find myself constantly playing chess with shared code and the abstractions that have been used to spread it over too many projects (like butter scraped over too much bread). I spend way too much time implementing the simplest of features, and I often have to distract devs who have been there longer than me to ask what the "right" way to do things is.
If you have to own this code (because you like feeding your family) you might find yourself feeling less like a developer and more like an "expert at figuring out how this specific shared/abstracted code fits together". Which is not a very marketable skill.
Thanks for the article. If you feel like writing a followup on how to climb out of a mess like this I'll have my notebook ready.
Experienced software and UX guy. Over 20 years making professional software. Lots of tech/tools/languages. Father of 7. Armchair philosopher. Currently focused on full stack dev with React, Node..
This is my career right now. I work in a small dev shop that has been around for a long time, but I'm relatively new. I've worked on a number of projects and this keeps coming up. Every time I open a project and start working I find myself handcuffed by the exact scenario you describe here.
For a developer it can be brutal to work with this kind of codebase. I find myself constantly playing chess with shared code and the abstractions that have been used to spread it over too many projects (like butter scraped over too much bread). I spend way too much time implementing the simplest of features, and I often have to distract devs who have been there longer than me to ask what the "right" way to do things is.
If you have to own this code (because you like feeding your family) you might find yourself feeling less like a developer and more like an "expert at figuring out how this specific shared/abstracted code fits together". Which is not a very marketable skill.
Thanks for the article. If you feel like writing a followup on how to climb out of a mess like this I'll have my notebook ready.
Ha. Nice allusion ("butter...").