We refactored half the business to fix a janky script
The author recounts how a 50-line janky script, originally a quick fix, grew into a core business component that required a massive refactoring. The article discusses the technical and organizational challenges of untangling and rebuilding half the business logic around that script, emphasizing that the code itself was the easy part compared to the surrounding complexity.
Background
- The article is about a real-world engineering dilemma: a small, poorly written script (the "janky script") had become so deeply embedded in company operations that fixing it required refactoring large parts of the business logic.
- The author, Swizec Teller, is a seasoned software engineer and writer who frequently discusses the gap between "toy" code and production systems.
- The key tension: in fast-moving startups, quick-and-dirty code often gets shipped to meet deadlines, then silently grows into a critical dependency that nobody wants to touch. Fixing it later means untangling it from everything else — what engineers call "breaking the abstraction boundary."
- The piece illustrates a classic principle in software engineering: the easy part is writing the code; the hard part is understanding the real-world constraints (people, processes, legacy data, business rules) that the code must live inside.