Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases

As a general rule, large established codebases produce 90% of the value. In any big tech company, the majority of the revenue-producing activity (i.e. the work that actually pays your engineering salary) comes from a large established codebase. I’ve seen multiple cases where a small elegant service powers some core feature of a high-revenue product, but all the actual productizing code (settings, user management, billing, enterprise reporting, etc) still lives in the large established codebase.

So you should know how to work in the “legacy mess” because that’s what your company actually does. Good engineering or not, it’s your job.

This was a great read as I’ve been immersed inside a large (but not too large) codebase at my new gig for the past few months now.

It’s funny: I never wanted a job as an engineer. But it turns out I kinda actually like this work? 🤔