Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
A software engineer reflects on the pitfalls of rewriting functional codebases solely to satisfy personal technical preferences. The author argues that legacy code often contains critical 'scar tissue'—fixes for edge cases that are lost during a full rewrite.
Why it matters
It provides a cautionary lesson for engineering management on the strategic risks of prioritizing developer satisfaction over business stability.
For a few weeks one summer I woke at 4am to rewrite code my employer had already paid someone to write. It ran in production every day, and it was built on CakePHP. I barely knew CakePHP, so every file looked wrong to me. I knew Laravel, and I loved working in it. So on my own time, unasked, I ported the thing piece by piece, swapping in Illuminate packages until the old framework was gone.
The content is a professional reflection on software engineering best practices with no political or social bias.
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