Just stop for a moment

I know there are deadlines in front of you that need to be met. They are the reason why you keep writing code. They are the cause of your lack of time - you are running from one deliverable to another, trying to deliver as fast as possible. Trying to deliver with the highest quality possible.

Refactoring vs. Redesign

It often happens that developers use words Refactoring and Redesign interchangeably. Why? I think that is because in both cases we are ending with the same result - code that is changed, but it does exactly the same thing as it was capable of doing at the beginning of the process.

Yet, in my opinion those words are not exact synonymous and before we will start to refactor the code it is good to know the difference.

Do you really need instanceof?

Using instanceof is a code smell. I think we may agree on that. Whenever I see a construction like that I’m sure that something went awry. Maybe someone just didn’t notice a problem when making a change? Maybe there was an idea, but it was so complex that it required so much effort or time that a developer made a decision not to do it? Maybe it was just laziness? Who knows. The fact remains that the code evolved into such state and we have to work with it.
Or maybe there is something that we can do about it? Something that will open our code for extensions?