How To Approach Refactoring
summary
Argues that refactoring is essential for agility and gives concrete, repeatable practices: write tests before changing (unit, integration, performance), isolate or remove dependencies rather than curl up with inversion frameworks, and eliminate duplication so a bug isn’t fixed in many places. Recommends tiny, reversible steps with continuous automated tests, frequent commits—ideally within minutes—to avoid merge hell, and keeps methods short enough to see in one screen; warns against clever code and heavy commenting.
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:28What is refactoring
- 4:44Why should we refactor
- 6:18Why do we write bad code
- 8:40Evolution
- 11:23Make it work
- 13:21Refactoring
- 17:12What if it breaks
- 21:01Zeroth Principle
- 22:03Functional Integration
- 24:26On Writing
- 25:23On Simplicity
- 26:03On Clarity
- 27:10On Gravity
- 27:44Single Letter Variables
- 29:10Zero Principle
- 32:48Clever Code
- 35:51Hard to Reuse
- 38:58The Process
- 39:44Level of abstraction
- 40:33Eliminate duplication
- 40:50Example of code duplication
- 41:35DRI principle
- 42:39Knock out dependencies
- 43:08Eliminate dependency not inverted
- 43:35Make comments redundant
- 45:48Good code should be self documented
- 47:00In seconds not minutes
- 48:11The right code
- 50:09Merge hell
- 50:25The second problem
- 51:53Code Smell
- 52:32Continuous Refactor
