Legacy Code In Practice

I love this blog post by Eric S. Raymond on dealing with NTPsec.  Raymond walks through his experience thus far with the NTPsec project, and especially with respect to eliminating outdated and buggy code.  This type of project hits home, enough that I decided to put together a blog series and turn it into a talk.  Although he’s talking gnarly C code and I’m talking gnarly SQL code, many of the practical techniques for trimming a nasty code base are the same across languages:  set up tests, remove obsolete code, simplify code, simplify design, and make use of appropriate language constructs to write safe, secure, and easy to read code.

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