Ruby — Facing a technical debt

This pretends to be a collection of articles in which I will narrate the way I deal with technical debt in my day to day. First of all I would like to thank my girlfriend who taught me the bases to understand what is a technical debt and the disadvantages that this could have in the long run.

I started a new job a few months ago and since I joined into the company I have been encountering a lot of problems with the development, many, but seriously many duplicated blocks and a kind of maze that results into an incomprehensible and giant code. Well I need to say that I’m not an expert but it really looks like a problem for anyone even for the best developers.

But hey! you need to get used.

So I started trying to rename some variables, removing some unnecessary lines, moving certaing things to a more properly space, but there seems to be no end and some days I’ve been almost crying, but ‘keep calm, this will be fixed, it just will take some time’ so I continue moving some logic out of loops, using the most appropiated methods and taking advandage of some of the cool Ruby stuff.

But a few weeks have passed and there doesn’t seem to be much change. the code still being giant, still ugly. So, how many time will it really take? the answer I found is “the eternity” A platform with a lot of technical debt which is constantly being updated will never have the time or the resources to take care of all the stuff that already exist and we want it or not somehow it works.

Mission of the week
I want to create some decorators and move all the formatting things into them, maybe this could be a good step and if not at least it will be a step.