why does the quality of your code matter? it matters if you plan on changing it often. visiting code just to improve it's quality will likely cause bugs and cos

why does the quality of your code matter? it matters if you plan on changing it often. visiting code just to improve it's quality will likely cause bugs and cost time/money to no end. focus your energy on code that's changing most frequently or growing the fastest. 0) human angle meet to determine what of these prevent sustainable operations or growth. if something becomes quadratically more painful in relation to team growth, deal with it quickly determine what things are annoyances that would save real time (getting angry at the codebase costs time) buy time from leadership; if leadership is not on-board with this, then it will always suffer 1) code review reviewing code when a company is growing is a good way for original authors to impart knowledge or suggest architectural improvements (often ones they wish they made). it also creates accountability and a discussion forum for the items that follow. 2) testing testing is like a ratchet and it can be used to build a punch-list of the most important things to fix over time. coming up with a way to test that gets you a lot for a little is key at first. here's an example for an API: (1) snapshot your database, (2) make a bunch of api calls, (3) turn those api calls into test cases (there are creative ways to do this quickly), (4) run them all the time, (5) reduce the number of failing tests over time find ways to turn your system into a function (use property based testing or fuzzing and you get a _lot_ for a little). testing smartly is an endeavor in creativity. an ex-coworker has recently written a lot about testing without focusing on so i needn't repeat his words (https://blog.nelhage.com https://blog.nelhage.com). 3) quality metrics and agreed-upon standards some linters are almost free to enable. you can automatically populate the code with ignore/bypass annotations and all new code should follow the standards. enforce these in code-review and monitor the chart of lints violated (also, lints violated per line of code) - ideally both should trend downwards 4) architectural patterns most companies have a few key architectural pieces that matter. make patterns/base-classes/whatever to ensure you can visit those with improvements without having to code-mod each one. that's what these software tools are for.