Guilt Free Refactoring - Not Just The Codebase!

Last Tuesday we hit a really important milestone internally and we unveiled the fruits of our labour. It was a pleasure to see the culmination of work I've been doing with my amazing team since June 2020!

Reflecting on the week since Tuesday, I'm anxious with how little coding I've done. We've got so much work to do and I feel ashamed I'm not demonstrably making progress toward it.

I've found the best weapon against my shame[0]Thank you to David Genn who introduced me to my "shadow side" being a cause of my shame - neat little snippet on it is within this post. has been to council myself as I would council my friends or my family. I'm kind to them and firmly root things in reality. With this in mind, I ask, if you haven't been coding then what have you been doing? Here's the list:

• An emotional team retro involving a lot of shared vulnerability
• Discussing the migration to centralised authentication/authorization
• Catching up with one of our Product Directors on our shared vision
• Jointly designing the evolving cross-company microservice architecture
• Delving into the tradeoffs between Trunk Based Development & Feature Branching with one of the team leads
• Testing new remote pair programming tools[1]Tuple seems amazing. Cloud9 is great if you're on AWS and only want the "hit and run" cost.
• Organising sponsorship for the London Java Community Unconference
• Canvasing the web for new hires to join us on our epic quest
• Reviewing CVs and getting a feel for people brave enough to reach out to me!
• Diving into the intricacies of one of our legacy systems
• Facilitating a cross-functional retrospective tackling resolving conflict, decision making and communication
• Aligning product managers and technology teams on how we manage resource contention across products
• Digging back into one of our data sources, which I haven't touched since May
• As always, dealing with my anxiety!

Gee whizz, sounds kind of ridiculous to be ashamed when it is all written out in black and white like that. Perhaps that is what is needed though, to simply face the reality and accept it as it is[2]“When you argue with reality, you always lose – but only 100% of the time” - The Work by Byron Katie.[2a]Thank you kindly to livingunbound.net for helping me track down the quote/source!
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I've done very little feature development and delivered very little into production this week. The important thing to note is I've made a tradeoff, that I've focussed my effort on what is effectively "refactoring the organisation". I never feel guilty when I'm refactoring code as part of TDD. So it feels odd to me to feel guilty when refactoring processes/communication/architecture across the organisation.

Naturally there is a balance to be struck here, it would be quite unlikely that I would be productive from simply refactoring all the time! I do want to take the stigma away from it though. Refactoring is something I want that to be proud of, whether it is codebase or a company!