In the technology industry, or any industry for that matter, there is a constant push to be developing new products. Create an aggressive schedule and push, if you want to get ahead. If a block of code works, you have to move on to the next item on your list, because there are a million things that don’t work yet, especially as the next dead line approaches. We always try and keep good coding practices, but sometimes stuff falls through the cracks.
We recently decided to make a fairly substantial change to how the networking on our soon to be released SmibsNet. This provided the perfect opportunity to go in and clean up some of that code that had not been looked at since it was developed. Don’t get me wrong, the code worked fine, thats why it had not been looked at for a while, but as changes occur in the design, the code slowly became a little messy.
Instead of making the new set of changes on top of our existing code, I looked at it as a renovation. I drew up a design of how I would code the network if I was starting from scratch. I then moved what functions I could into there new locations. I took all the redundant code, and turned it into loadable modules. I stripped out almost 3 megabyte of code into a separate folder. This way I could pull out the useful bits as I needed them. Finally, the rebuild began.
It took about 3 days, but now the new design is running beautifully. The usability is greatly improved, due to our now simpler approach to networking. The code was cut in halve and now it’s clean and organized. Everything is where you would expect. This should make all future additions of new features go much smoother, decrease the load on our servers, and will certainly make the next few weeks of development a more pleasant experience.
This is a friendly reminder to other developers that taking a few days to clean up your existing code, can really help you develop your next great feature.
