Rebuilding From the Inside Out: Daneeha's Wrox Book on Refactoring

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil. ”

-Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, a British computer scientist, later paraphrased by Donald Knuth in his book The Art of Computer Programming

Days ago, watching a documentary about the life of South American movie director Fabián Bielinsky, I paid particular attention to a thought he shared during an interview. He said that, when filming scenes, it usually happens that a given scene isn’t taped as the director originally assumed it would be. Sometimes that scene is reworked until the director gets what was originally wanted, while in some other occasions it’s just left the way it came, as it’s considered exponentially better than the initial sketch. So he concluded that the real art of making movies is deciding wisely when to do it again and when to just take what was gotten the first time around

Surprisingly, if that is the case for making movies, coding components is very similar to taping scenes. It’s always possible to get better approaches for a given algorithm. So, with the manager hat in our heads, we must decide when to freeze an always possible improvement for the sake of the timeline, budget, delivery due dates and general customer satisfaction, and when to go on and get more

So here is where we address the need for refactoring: a series of techniques and mechanisms to improve the quality -understandability, maintainability, modularity, extensibility, and so on- of code segments by reformulating their sentences in such a way that the general behavior remains unchanged. In other words, the behavior of the affected components shouldn’t vary as a consequence of the process but their quality, and hopefully, their longevity, should be increased

(The paragraphs above were extracted from the foreword I wrote for this Wrox book)

From Macedonia to Chile, from Chile to the World, Danijel Arsenovski (or simply Daneeha, as I claim having re-baptized the friend I met at the end of 2002 during a multinational Java project) reaches an important milestone in his career as Refactoring evangelist with this published book. In South America and particularly in Chile, lots of professional developers and architects first met the Refactoring concept thanks to the incipient talks Daneeha delivered for both Java and Visual Basic crowds

He also decisively participated in a major refactoring project for the bank we first met, rescuing the Corporate Financial Terminal (or TFC, such the project acronym in Spanish, the language spoken there, which Daneeha learned when immigrating from the Balkans) from being dropped and replaced by an upcoming new system due to the evident costs of maintenance TFC had. Daneeha wasn't alone and it wouldn't be justice to avoid mentioning Angel Valdés, Juan Barrera, Jorge Chávez and some other key players. The important thing is how the bank maximized the ROI of this project, turning a low-voice admitted failure into a source of revenue to be proud of

Daneeha comes back to tell you how to do the same. For profit and warranted fun. Why not