From the Trenches

Every day I keep the Boy Scout Rule more present in mind: “Leave the code you’ve worked on in a better state than you found it.” There’s nothing more demoralizing than joining a project that feels like a fast food restaurant on a weekend, just before closing time.

So I’m more than ready to propose the Picasso Rule:

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

Taking the artist literally: to build something new in an old project, you must first destroy it. If nothing’s salvageable, reduce it to ashes and rebuild from there.

Whenever we stumble upon a project that’s poorly—or not at all—documented, badly designed, and full of awful or missing abstractions... Endless lines of tightly coupled code, broken or inconsistent tests, configuration hidden in some developer’s long-lost local environment... Finding one (or all) of these conditions is a sure sign that any task started in this codebase could drag on indefinitely.

Unfortunately, experience also shows that warnings often fall on deaf ears. Managers, driven by urgency, launch engineers like blind generals sending infantry to certain death. There’s no planning or strategy in that approach—just brute force and hope that the last soldier’s determination results in a Pyrrhic victory.

So if you're being treated like a kamikaze, the best thing you can do is be as effective as possible: Find your target’s weak spot and dive headfirst to maximize the destruction. Make your sacrifice count—so those who follow can build something better.

exit(0);