Preface

The motivation to write this book has been growing gradually throughout my career as a software developer. Like many other developers, I spent the majority of my time working with code written by other people and dealing with the various problems that entails. I wanted to learn and share knowledge about how to maintain software, but I couldn’t find many people who were willing to discuss it. Legacy almost seemed to be a taboo subject.

I found this quite surprising, because most of us spend the majority of our time working with existing software rather than writing entirely new applications. And yet, when you look at tech blogs or books, most people are writing about using new technologies to build new software. This is understandable, because we developers are magpies, always looking for the next shiny new toy to entertain us. All the same, I felt that people should be talking more about legacy software, so one motivation for this book is to start a discussion. If you can improve on any of the advice in this book, please write a blog about it and let the world know.

At the same time, I noticed that a lot of developers had given up on any attempt to improve their legacy software and make it more maintainable. Many people seemed to be afraid of the code that they maintained. So I also wanted the book to be a call to arms, inspiring developers to take charge of their legacy codebases.