Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Chapter 24: We Feel Overwhelmed. It Isn’t Going to Get Any Better

We Feel Overwhelmed Working in legacy code is difficult. There is no denying it. Although every situation is different, one thing is going to make the job worth it to you as a programmer or not: figuring out what is in it for you. For some people, it is a paycheck, and there isn’t anything wrong with that—we all have to make a living. But there really ought to be some other reason why you are programming.

If you were lucky, you started out in this business writing code because you thought it was fun. You sat down with your first computer ecstatic with all of the possibilities, all of the cool things you could do by programming a computer. It was something to learn and something ...