Learning To Refactor

One of the most difficult concepts to teach in software development is refactoring over time.

The idea that your app should be able to change quickly. When you get new requirements you can implement them without tearing the whole thing down and starting over. Users don’t know what they want. Businesses don’t know what they want. Everything changes all the time.

But most curriculums show students how to do things a single way and explain why that’s the correct way and mostly that’s the end of it.

It’s the most challenging thing to teach because it takes time to understand this. You have to watch your code get thrown away multiple times because the business changed their mind. You need to experience pushy customers who don’t understand tech at all.

The specific technologies you learn are less important than understanding why these tools work they way they work. The mistakes previous devs have made that led us here. To some degree you need to experience it to understand. That’s why we value experience so much.