The trick to making a rewrite work is to only rewrite what you know how to rewrite. What I mean by that is a lot of people will be working on a project and will

The trick to making a rewrite work is to only rewrite what you know how to rewrite. What I mean by that is a lot of people will be working on a project and will at some point say to themself "This project is really hard, I can't get anything done, I have no idea what is going on. My only solution is to do a complete code rewrite". If this is your mindset going into a large refactor, you are bound to either fail, or end up with a system that is just as badly composed as it was before. On the other hand, if you're saying to yourself "This code really sucks, they wrote their own complex CSV parser, I can rewrite this to use the CSV library in the standard lib" and things like that, no matter how big the task may seem, it'll work out in the end.