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Podcast 318: What's the half-life of your code?

Think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow.

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This week we chat about the half-life of the software you create. Why does some get refactored after six weeks while another program goes untouched for years? How do you know when it's time to say goodbye to your codebase and try a new architecture?

Episode Notes

This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here. It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of software as, "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable."

This topic also connected to a post we ran on the Stack Overflow blog this week, Sacrificial Architecture: learning from abandoned systems. The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggest that one should "think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow."

Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Ishmael, who explained why JSON dumps your formatting and how to fix it.

TRANSCRIPT

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