Refactoring JavaScript with pipeline style programming

[@DevMastery]

Did you learn something new? What would you like to see next?

[@antoinelb8509]

This question is not about code but more of a lead dev position: You are a experience developer that has being called by a company that is having a hard time with the codebase. The entire project has been done by inexperienced developers, and to put it in a simple way everything is bad about the code; messy, inexplicable bugs, no documentation, no tests... a total mess. The thing is that the app is quite a big and is already running in production with third parties relying on this program. So the question(s) would be: what are the first things your are gonna look for? what are the things that will shape the most your decisions? what would you recommend anyone to do? has this happened to you? Is starting from scratch the entire project an option you would consider? advice for companies to avoid ending up there? or any thing else you want to share about it I believe it would be very interesting. Thanks, I'm following your videos from very close

[@DevMastery]

Thanks for your question. I wrote an article called “How to Conquer Legacy Code” that touches on a lot of the topics you’ve raised. Here’s a link: link.medium.com/EcrEQ344ZT I hope you find it useful. I’ll also look for opportunities to talk more about this in upcoming videos. In the meantime, to answer some of your questions more directly. As a consultant, I face the situation you’re describing very often. In fact, I’ve had clients hire me specifically to deal with this kind of problem. Completely throwing away and replacing a mission critical app is rarely practical or even possible; no matter how satisfying we think it might feel. So, in my experience, the winning strategy (as I described in that article) is one of incremental improvement. Every time you touch the code to fix a bug or add a feature, you need to leave the code in better shape than you found it. Sometimes that’s just a matter of a simple refactor and a bit of documentation, other times it requires you to build new features in a way that is decoupled from the legacy code and connect them via an adapter pattern or microservice, so that you’re effectively replacing the app in small increments. Hope that help.

[@antoinelb8509]

​@@DevMastery Amazing article, Thanks!

[@wsh4and]

@@antoinelb8509 This is exactly what I am facing right now :). But instead of developing from a current project, I am tasked with migrating a desktop app to a totally new web app with a mess code from the desktop app!

[@LindseyandCaleb]

I found your channel and have been watching and rewatching everything you've posted. I looks like you've retired this project but thank you for what you have. As someone who is entry to mid level and hasn't seen much production code, these videos are extremely valuable and will help me level up. I'm a fan and I hope you start posting again!

[@DevangPatil]

11.09 can't we do it using method chaining?

[@jacsurfing]

please make a video about. RabitMQ or Kafka in NodeJS

[@helmialfathseptiana6383]

this is truly gold.

[@pablocba90]

really good example!

[@afiiiiiii]

man i have been in ur newsletter for years, ur the best, love what u r doing!

[@DevMastery]

Thanks!

[@KrishnaList]

Register dependency with IOC and resolve runtime

[@nromancarcamo]

I'm writing my code in sort of imperative + FP but more FP using currying to have referential transparency and now I'm adapting the code to pipelines style and it looks really well, hell that operator will change my code style a lot, can't wait!.

[@radvilardian]

Hey man, thank you so much for this piece of tutorial. You're so awesome.

[@enzoferey]

Hi there ! Unfortunately, I’m never able to make it to the live, but this show is in my weekly TODO list every week :) Already shared it on Twitter and I have been subscribed to your newsletter for a while, hope more people will come to learn. Thank you !

[@DevMastery]

Thanks Enzo! I hope to see you next Monday.

[@benpurcell591]

Good stuff, I like the way you code

[@amazekhashaa7309]

Did you use face powder?

[@producdevity]

Great explanation! One comment, if I'm not mistaking your custom pipe function wouldn't work if the promise returns a falsy value. Maybe a video that expands on this would be something to consider since this is a very interesting topic!

[@producdevity]

Oh I think it probably does work since the value is wrapped in a promise. Not sure tho

[@DevMastery]

+Yassine Gherbi it doesn’t evaluate the promise it just checks for the existence of a “then” property which is always truthy in the case of a promise.

[@BertoldSzekeres]

I like this pipe method, it's kinda how mongo queries work. You could also have created a class for the process and chain the class methods together. Nice video btw, well explained!

[@ayoubhr77]

Im a novice to programming and this was really easy to grasp thank you!!

[@alexanderommm]

Why don't you check situations when there is no string?

[@marcusbrsp]

Good stuff, keep it up! Is that a Boston dialect btw?

[@sweetfigs1]

great topic

[@igor_cojocaru]

Thank you for useful tips!

[@thatchipmunksings]

Aren't functions in general expensive? As in it would require far jump in assembly level instead of the regular stepwise flow to invoke and execute a function. But then again, our systems have become significantly faster than when this was a concept to care about. Also it would be a performance vs quality trade off. But I would like to hear your opinion on this point.

[@jurepustoslemsek7882]

this is only a concern if you're a C programmer that develops for old embedded microcontrollers. and even then, many function calls are inlined by the compiler, so that they execute as if the function wasn't there. I even read somewhere that trying to manually minimize the number of function calls could actually make your code run slower, not faster. it's always better to write quality code first, and only optimize later if it turns out that it's causing performance problems

[@thatchipmunksings]

@@jurepustoslemsek7882 makes sense! Thank you

[@fatphilg]

Very clear explanations, thank you. I noticed you're using something that evaluates your javascript after each line (or keypress?). Is that just you debugging in the browser console?

[@DevMastery]

I used a little app called RunJS for this video, which I like for quick experiments. runjs.dev

[@fatphilg]

Cool. I’ll give it a shot! Thanks.