Jos de Jong

When developing a new application, your code base starts small and simple. Over time, your code grows and becomes more complex. It can be hard to fight complexity and keep a code base maintainable in the long run. Here some principles that help me with that. Recon with the cost of maintaining code, not just the cost of development When buying a car, it’s quite easy to reckon with both the cost of the one-time purchase as well as ongoing costs like fuel, taxes, and maintenance. You can calculate the impact of choosing this bad-ass, inefficient car over a small, efficient car in the long run. For some reason, in software development we mostly calculate the costs of developing a new feature only, and tend to forget that every new feature has an impact on the complexity and maintainability of the code, resulting in a “tax” on all future changes in this code base.