> In the last several years, I was at two companies that got rid of all their previous code, and did radical re-writes of everything: Over the last few years t

> In the last several years, I was at two companies that got rid of all their previous code, and did radical re-writes of everything: Over the last few years the best work I've done has been to take what existed and slowly refactor it into something better. Well, I say slowly, but the refactors themselves were often quick. I try to identify the most common pain points - for both users and developers - and eliminate those as quickly as possible. The overall codebase might not get better at a crazy rate that way, but the developer experience goes up, meaning fewer bugs, meaning quicker iteration times and more confidence making changes that should be easy but so often are not. And the end result of that two or three years on is a significant improvement in the quality of the code, the number of bugs - breaking or otherwise - that users encounter, and often times a manyfold decrease in the total LOC that need to be maintained. I've tried rewriting some things as well: but even when it's a literal requirement in order to switch underlying platforms, it still causes a lot more friction than refactoring does. I've got three projects right now where the deadlines have massively slipped, and I'm now at the point where I'm looking to try to take some of the rewrites and backport them to the original platform just so that migration goes a little easier when the rest of the pieces fall into place.