L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Companion to SOFTWAREARCHITECTUREMASTERYCURRICULUM.md Honest reflections, no sugar coating.
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Course · 6 lessons
~30 hr
Intermediate
Refactoring & Working with Legacy Code
Refactoring & Working with Legacy Code covers: Refactoring, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Extreme Programming Explained. Master the discipline of changing code structure without changing behavior. Learn to work safely with code you did not write, code you wrote years ago, and code that has no tests. A long-maintained library is a masterclass in maintaining code over time. Every version bump, every deprecation, every backward-compatible change is a refactoring decision. This module gives you the vocabulary for what you already do: Fowler's "Branch by Abstraction" is how you deprecate features. Feathers' "Sprout Method" is how you add behavior to complex controllers without touching existing logic. The difference after this module: you will name these techniques, apply them systematically, and teach them to others.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete Design Patterns first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
Refactoring: The Discipline of Small, Safe Steps
You refactor constantly. You rename a method, extract a private helper, collapse two near-identical branches — you've done it so often it feels like grooming, not engineering. Her…
primary
Refactoring Guru (online course)
locked
L3
Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Cover, Then Modify
Feathers opens with a definition that will rearrange your bookshelf: legacy code is code without tests. Not old code. Not bad code. Not the previous team's code. A method you wrot…
primary
Refactoring Guru (online course)
locked
L4
Extreme Programming Explained: The Philosophy Behind the Practice
Strip the buzzwords from your best engineering habits and look at what's left: you commit small and often, you keep CI green, you write tests before or with the code, you refactor…
primary
Refactoring Guru (online course)
locked
L5
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L6
Project: Characterize and Refactor a Legacy Class
Find a 200+-line class with thin test coverage — yours or an open-source Rails app's — and do the thing that makes legacy code safe to change: pin its current behavior with charac…
locked
6 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.