Reuniting with the Past
A couple of weeks ago, something happened to me that eventually happens to all of us sooner or later. I was looking for a snippet of logic for a new project and remembered that I had already solved something similar in an application I built about three years ago. It was an internal management tool I made for a small local business, my first serious freelance gig. With all the excitement in the world, I opened the repository in VS Code and, good lord, I almost had a developer heart attack.
The Arrogance of My Current "Self"
My first reaction was pure horror. Looking at that code, my brain started screaming: "Who on earth wrote this mess?" There were three-hundred-line functions, variables with names as descriptive as data2 or aux, and a component hierarchy that looked like a plate of spaghetti dumped over the keyboard. In that moment, possessed by a mix of pride and technical perfectionism, I decided I couldn't leave it like that. I set out to refactor everything. "I'll have it ready and clean in a weekend," I told myself with a level of naivety that I actually find sweet today.
What started as a quick facelift turned into a descent into development hell. I started deleting things, modularizing, shoving TypeScript where before there was only a giant any, and suddenly, everything stopped working. What I saw as "ugly code" turned out to be a delicate ecosystem of patches and clever workarounds that solved problems I didn't even remember anymore.
When "Ugly Code" Gave Me a Reality Check
As I tried to "fix" the disaster, I realized a great truth: that code, no matter how bad it looked now, had been running for three years without a single production error. Three years. While trying to rewrite an especially convoluted filtering logic, I discovered that my nested IFs weren't a product of carelessness, but of a bunch of edge cases the client had asked for along the way.
That's when humility hit me head-on. My self from three years ago wasn't a bad developer; he was a developer solving real problems with the tools and knowledge he had at the time. That "dirty" code was a testament to hours of fighting bugs, late-night calls to fix server issues, and a deep understanding of the end user's needs—something that I, in my quest for aesthetic cleanliness, had completely ignored.
Why Are We So Afraid of Old Code?
Sometimes we get obsessed with the latest trends, with Clean Code taken to the extreme, and with having the most elegant repository on GitHub. But we forget that our main job isn't to write poetry in JavaScript syntax, but to create solutions that provide value. Perfect code that never makes it to production is worthless. "Ugly" code that helps a person manage their business every day is worth everything.
I realized that many times we want to refactor not out of technical necessity, but because of our own ego. It bothers us to see that we didn't know as much back then as we do now. We want to erase the trail of our own evolution because we're embarrassed by it. But you know what? If you look at your code from three years ago and you don't feel like crying a little, it means you haven't learned anything in all this time. That shame is, in fact, the clearest indicator of your professional growth.
What I've Learned (And Why I Closed the Refactor Tab)
In the end, after spending all Saturday breaking things, I made the most sensible decision: git checkout . and I closed the project. I understood that refactoring for the simple sake of something not looking "pretty" is a waste of time and resources, unless there's a real performance or maintainability issue that justifies it.
I learned that code is a living organism that reflects a specific moment in time. I've learned to respect my past versions more. If that code fulfilled its purpose, kept the client happy, and got my invoice paid, then it was good code. It wasn't perfect, but it was effective.
// What I wanted to write now:
const processOrder = (order) => order.items.reduce((acc, curr) => acc + curr.price, 0);
// What my self from 3 years ago wrote:
function total(pedido) {
let t = 0;
for(let i=0; i
Looking at the example above, the reduce is more elegant, yes. But the for loop with that comment reminded me of a last-minute change that saved a sales campaign. If I had changed it without thinking, I would have broken the client's accounting system.
Final Reflections
My advice for anyone who finds themselves in this situation is simple: be kind to your past self. Don't rewrite just to feel like a better developer today. If something works, respect it. Study why it was done that way before judging it. And above all, value functionality over unnecessary technical aesthetics. Software development is a long-distance race, and every line of ugly code you wrote was a necessary step to get to where you are now. In the end, what matters isn't how clean the code looks on your screen, but the impact that code has in the real world.