Every developer has spent time working on at least one project that was rife with poorly or bizarrely-named variables/methods/types, dead code, impossibly long code blocks, misleading comments, contorted logic, ancient libraries and dependencies that are never upgraded, and worse.

“Someday,” of course, “we’ll clean that up” — but there are urgent features already promised to customers, urgent bugs, and of course everything is always running late because the codebase is so darn hard to work with.

So yeah, curse the earlier developers who made the first mistakes, right?