Refactoring

When I read the article Daniel referred to in his Apgar score post, and I came away with a different lesson. My central observation was that simply by tracking the Apgar score, doctors and hospitals became more interested in reviving babies that they might previously have diagnosed as stillborn.

When I've contributed to projects with fewer global variables, I've noticed that the flexibility and maintainability of the code has been significantly greater, and I have more fun working with it. My theory: if there are no globals, we can predict that an object doesn't play with any toys that we haven't given it.

I recently finished my first "real" Windows Forms app in .NET 2.0, and when I finally got to a "complete" working version I was ready to do some cleanup and refactoring. So, I began combing through my code, reading for things I wasn't completely satisfied with. After correcting a few "magic numbers" type issues, it so happened that Brian came by my desk. Brian is a younger colleague here, really sharp guy, great attitude--one of the ones who "gets it". And he points out that I'm using "old school" Collection classes, when I could be using Generics.