Hello everyone!
Tuesday March 18 2025 evening was all about Refactoring with C++ by Dmitry Danilov.
But before we dive to the summary – we’ll mention that there was a Job posting presented by Parker Lanning – Looking for Mid Sr. C++ Developer Role – contract role. Please feel free to contact Parker.
We also mentioned the following:
- A new C++ exercises website – give it a shot!
- Iterators! 7 Interesting (and Powerful) Uses for C++ Iterators – John Farrier – interesting read!
You can find the recording here:
Link to the meetup page.
I’ll start by saying that I really like Refactoring business, and especially in C++. A clear evidence that there is indeed something wrong with me. (Un?)Fortunately, Refactoring is part of our life. Code evolves, rotten and not maintained correctly. There is some joy in taking such code and making it better, more readable, modern, more maintainable and sometimes even faster!
The book is good. It has a lot of good information in Design choices, reasons for tech debt, how to avoid it, SOLID and more! Grab the book!
So what did we discuss?
- First, checkout the variety of books available on this subject.
- Checkout Refactoring.Guru – great site! also has the Design Patterns aspect.
- We discussed clean code, technical debts, why this is happening, what happens with personal taste? How about the gaps in ones knowledge of the language, the libraries, good practices?
- People who don’t know about the tool, have questions and concerns. How would I know that std::accumulate is actually doing the right thing and not shooting a rocket to the moon (well, as part of the accumulate operation?)
- What is a boring but effective API? How about consistent API, const-correct API?
- What is SOLID? Why it’s so important and not just a buzzword or a Software marketing term. (It’s not just marketing term, it’s super important foundation!). Also think about KISS!
- How about C++ Core Guidelines ? Yes, these are good and important to know!
- We discussesed Strategy Pattern, Dependency Injection, Interface Segregation and of course, I mentioned the C++ Design pattern bible of the modern days: C++ Software Design: Design Principles and Patterns for High-Quality Software, by Klaus Iglberger
- We closed with some low hanging fruits for refactoring Legacy code.
There is no universe where we can cover everything in < 1hr. So please take a look at the book and other useful resources. Do it for yourself, future self and your team.
Oh yes – AI might save us and write better, more idiomatic code for us. I want to believe this would happen soon (well you could argue that it is already happening).
Thanks for reading,
Kobi