alt Hacker News>The idea being that if you're working in an area, you should refactor and tidy it up and clean up "tech debt" while there.
This is horrible practice, and very typical junior behavior that needs to be corrected against. Unless you wrote it, Chesterton's Fence applies; you need to think deeply for a long time about why that code exists as it does, and that's not part of your current task. Nothing worse than dealing with a 1000 line PR opened for a small UI fix because the code needed to be "cleaned up".
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esafak • yesterday at 7:41 PM
Just do it in a follow up PR to keep them atomic. But do clean up; it's so easy now.
That is the flip side of what you're arguing against, and is also very typical junior behaviour that needs to be corrected against.
Tech debt needs to be dealt with when it makes sense. Many times it will be right there and then as you're approaching the code to do something else. Other times it should be tackled later with more thought. The latter case is frequently a symptom of the absence of the former.
In Extreme Programming, that's called the Boy Scouting Rule.
https://furqanramzan.github.io/clean-code-guidelines/princip...