Something that can happen is you keep to the standard of the current code when you start working on it, especially when something is contact freelance, no sense

Something that can happen is you keep to the standard of the current code when you start working on it, especially when something is contact freelance, no sense in undoing what is already there, just do the best you can to tack on what you need to. One project I was working like this for a while, until it got to the point where it seemed I was going to be spending a lot of time on the code base. I was working around maybe 20% of the code that wasn't mine so I finally decided it would be worth the time to rewrite out the old bad practises.