Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code “on the fly” into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer—but only if you work at it.
Why your previous developer was terrible
When the previous developer (or team) had to develop it, they had to deal with a LOT of unknowns. They had to make many decisions under a cloak of opacity. You are cursed with the knowledge of the present, so the system seems like a hackjob of bad decisions.
Good Tech Lead, Bad Tech Lead: Pragmitism
Good tech leads are pragmatic and find a balance between doing it right and getting it done. They cut corners when it’s expedient but never out of laziness. They encourage their team to find temporary shortcuts or workarounds to problems that are blocking overall progress, and to build minimum viable infrastructure for launch. To good tech leads, details matter. Code quality, code reviews, and testing are just as important as shipping on time.
What is Dependency Injection?
As a rule of thumb, constructor injection is best for required dependencies, like in our example, and setter injection is best for optional dependencies, like a cache object for instance.