At some point on your journey to Releasing Relentlessly, an engineer on your team will demand a rewrite.
They will present their case with a sense of urgency. Without a rewrite, we can’t deploy frequently. The code is holding us back. We need to just rewrite the code. Please.
I should know. That engineer was me.
Our Laravel API felt like a mess. We had no automated testing and experienced a stream of regressions with any change. Our code was brittle and tightly coupling made change difficult. This was no environment for frequent deployments.
Maybe we should just rewrite our API, I thought. Start from scratch and gradually move API endpoints over to the new system. Eventually the old system would be fully deprecated. We can even try a new language!
I felt butterflies in my stomach thinking of a well-tested and clean codebase. I was convinced – we needed a rewrite.
Then I talked with a technical mentor about the problem. He had a simpler solution. Just start a clean area in your existing codebase. Hold the clean workspace to higher standards for code quality and testing.
We called it v5 and started adding code. We had a few agreements for v5:
- No copy/pasting from the old world
- Everything needs code review
- Everything needs tests
- Everything follows our coding standards
In v5, we applied the clean code approaches that we discussed in our Engineering Book Club. This clean code gave me butterflies without the burden of a massive rewrite.
The underlying problem wasn’t the code after all. The problem was our low standards.
Our team wasn’t ready for a rewrite because we weren’t doing the little things well and when we started doing the little things well we realized that we did not need a rewrite. We needed to refactor.
After 2 years, over 90% of our API code lives in v5. I’m thankful everyday that we didn’t enter into the boondoggle of a rewrite.
