Technical Debt

Every developer has been there: you inherit a codebase that looks like a bowl of spaghetti, and your first instinct is to say, “We need to rewrite this.” You see the outdated libraries, the inconsistent naming conventions, and the lack of unit tests, and you think, “I could do this so much better from scratch.” But a rewrite is rarely just a technical decision. It’s a social and ethical one. Legacy code is code that is working. It’s code that is paying the bills, processing the transactions, and serving the users. When we dismiss it as “trash,” we are dismissing the context, the constraints, and the hard work of the engineers who came before us. ...

In the fast-paced world of software development, we often find ourselves standing on the shoulders of giants – or more accurately, on top of layers upon layers of legacy code. These aging systems, some decades old, continue to power critical infrastructure in industries ranging from finance to healthcare. While they may lack the glamour of cutting-edge technologies, these legacy systems are the bedrock of many organizations, silently processing millions of transactions every day. ...