Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
by bcrosby95 on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:16AM
(#20125389)
An example of really bad technical debt we made in one of our projects was: back when Facebook apps were a thing, another social networking site released an app platform that was very similar to Facebook. Some companies had early partnership and launched at release, but we weren't aware of it and were caught flat footed.
Our code wasn't built to be generic enough to be able to work on anything but Facebook. So what we did was simple: copy the whole project, change the stuff that didn't work right.
The next time a social networking site released a platform we refactored our main code and introduced the proper abstractions so we could use it on all 3 sites. That code ended up working for most of the other social networks that launched an app platform.
Our code wasn't built to be generic enough to be able to work on anything but Facebook. So what we did was simple: copy the whole project, change the stuff that didn't work right.
The next time a social networking site released a platform we refactored our main code and introduced the proper abstractions so we could use it on all 3 sites. That code ended up working for most of the other social networks that launched an app platform.