We’ve all been there at some point. We joined a new company or a new engineering group, and none of this “legacy code” makes any sense. The longer you stare at it, the louder that voice becomes… the voice that tells you to just rewrite it all.

But should you? In this short talk, we’ll try to explore the good, the bad, and the unavoidably ugly of dealing with legacy code. We’ll take a deeper look into the psychology behind the desires we all share to remake code in our image, why it’s not always the best approach and when it actually is. Lastly we will discuss some practical tips for successfully dealing with legacy code management and hopefully surviving to refactor another day.