Do you ever find yourself working on a codebase that has gotten a bit rusty over time? Or read an old script and have trouble understanding what it does?
It happens to me regularly, be it code that I wrote myself, or code I was tasked with, such as the established igraph R package. In this talk, I share some of my strategies to suffer less when renovating a codebase, as well as prevention ideas to make future renovations less likely, or easier.
I also discuss the human challenges of software maintenance, based on observations of the federation of maintainers that we try to nurture at rOpenSci.