On: That coworker who never stops refactoring

[fudged71]

Our CTO cofounder was a "technical genius" asshole who did 3 entire rewrites of our stack before a single user touched the product. He would come back from a weekend and say "I stayed up and refactored everything to make it faster". Of course this left our other developer completely in the dark and it broke a lot of shit in the process.

We ultimately fired him and got another cofounder up to speed into that role. It was the most frustrating red flag that we should have caught earlier and put a stop to.

[disgruntledphd2 → fudged71]

If you don't have test coverage, you can't refactor (or at least it's a terrible idea).

The first step in refactoring is writing a test (probably component level at first) such that you can make sure you don't break anything.

Seriously, this is all covered in Fowler's book on refactoring (which is incredibly worth a read).