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ALAN
Yeah, I did! In fact, back when I was a kid, nothing fascinated me more than the mechanical vending machines at my dad’s office. You dropped in a coin, listened for the clink, and made your selection. The machine would spring to life: hissing, clicking, and whirring. When the automatic ballet ended, the final sound was that glorious, aromatic, black liquid splashing into the cup. C’est Magnifique!
These days, I’m more fascinated by the inner workings of software. (We both are.) And, like that coffee machine, there are all kinds of hidden complexity in code. But, software doesn’t start out complex, does it?
Show of hands: how many of you have worked on a greenfield or brand new application? How did that feel? Ok. How about legacy applications? How many of you have worked on one? How did that feel?
In our experience, greenfield development is enjoyable. It feels fast. There’s no existing code to work around. But, developing in a legacy applications feels harder. Why is that? We believe it has to do with complexity. We think that at some point a code base crosses a complexity threshold, after which we have two choices: