Live Long and Refactor
summary
Case study of a yearlong refactor at National Journal refactors the authentication and authorization stack using Django and GitHub tickets and delivers incremental vertical slices that each include tests, deployment, and human validation; work starts by stabilizing the app, adding basic smoke tests and test scaffolding, then follows the strangler pattern and the Mikado Method to trace root causes, accept temporary duplication, deploy often, and ultimately replace the old system without user-visible outages.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:27Star Trek Voyager
- 3:09What is a refactor
- 4:13When and why to refactor
- 7:40When to do a largescale refactor
- 9:03Steps to refactor
- 11:24Test Coverage
- 12:49Root Cause
- 14:11Refactor Cycle
- 16:40Ticket Structure
- 17:06Refactor Phase
- 19:39Writing Clean Maintainable Code
- 23:03Resources
- 24:15Recap
- 25:47Rewrite
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