Stop Treating Your Symptoms

Lately I’ve been working in other peoples code. It’s generally a practice that I don’t like to do, but this project required it and I was happy to oblige. After a few weeks in it was clear that there were so many triage situations holding this front end together that a complete rewrite was going to be necessary.

It’s frustrating to me when we treat the symptoms of our coding problems instead of treating the problems themselves. If we took our investigation a step further we could discover the root of the problem and work to remedy that for our future selves and future developers who hop into our code.