Fair points. I guess I was reacting more to the fact that the original example probably wasn't of the scale (single person) to use as an example. The Facebook c

Fair points. I guess I was reacting more to the fact that the original example probably wasn't of the scale (single person) to use as an example. The Facebook case is definitely different in that they were building new features too fast to keep up with. My project (single developer) is undergoing a big underlying change (switching from MongoDB to Postgresql) at the moment. I still need to keep development going on the live branch while I do this work. I'm doing it because I'm having maintainability issues with the data store that I've been putting off for a couple of months. It's as you say - make sure you refactor before you discover that refactoring is impossible. It's something I do regularly and my business partner has noticed that after a refactor of a component he gets other features faster so that's the only justification he needs.