Hacking, Refactoring, Rewriting, and Technical Debt

(Not so much “lessons” here, as “observations and recollections.”)

I.

From ESR, How To Learn Hacking:

• Hacking is done on open source. Today, hacking skills are the individual micro-level of what is called “open source development” at the social macro-level. [2] A programmer working in the hacking style expects and readily uses peer review of source code by others to supplement and amplify his or her individual ability.
• Hacking is lightweight and exploratory. Rigid procedures and elaborate a-priori specifications have no place in hacking; instead, the tendency is try-it-and-find-out with a rapid release tempo.
• Hacking places a high value on modularity and reuse. In the hacking style, you try hard never to write a piece of code that can only be used once. You bias towards making general tools or libraries that can be specialized into what you want by freezing some arguments/variables or supplying a context.
• Hacking favors scrap-and-rebuild over patch-and-extend. An essential part of hacking is ruthlessly throwing away code that has become overcomplicated or crufty, no matter how much time you have invested in it.

This strikes me as the opposite of, or at best orthogonal to, the practice of refactoring a large and long-existing codebase, especially that last. “Scrap and rebuild” is essentially “rewrite from scratch” and that is almost always a losing proposition in terms of time and budget.

But then, the description also says hacking is “lightweight, exploratory, modular” — so perhaps it is possible to hack at components within a larger or critical system, and then refactor the system using that result. Cf. Hacking and Refactoring, also from ESR.

II.

I used to work for a consulting company with One Big Client (and a few smaller ones). This One Big Client generated a staggering amount of money; its business model was such that even a few minutes of downtime would result in large losses (technically “lost revenue” but the effect is the same).

The consultancy’s director of development for the One Big Company didn’t “believe” in technical debt. Or rather, he thought technical debt was a non-issue. He would write, or demand writing, some of the most horrific code, as long as it was written *quickly*, because the time constraints for the One Big Client were so overwhelming. There was no refactoring; he and his team would iterate fast, then wipe out the entire codebase and start all over again on a regular basis. (By “regular” I mean every 3-6 months). Any technical debt that was incurred was tiny in comparison to the monetary returns — although it did take a toll on the programmers themselves.

Given ESR above, that’s clearly a “hacking” approach to a critical codebase. Also, it’s clear that *sometimes* a full-on rewrite might be the right thing to do, provided the right context. But I’m betting the vast majority of developers (I’m talking “five nines” here) are not operating in the context of that One Big Client and that particular consultancy. These were “skilled developers knowingly writing low-quality code” — not to be confused with “*un*skilled developers *un*knowingly writing low-quality code.” (Cf. Mehdi Khalili: “On Bad Code.”)