This code is a crime scene!
There’s been a murder. The victim? A perfectly respectable software project. The codebase is riddled with technical debt. Nobody dares touch that module. Deployments require two developers, a spreadsheet and a small religious ceremony. So, who killed it? Was it the developer who copied and pasted the same logic six times? The architect and their seventeen microservices? The product owner who kept changing the requirements? Let’s examine the evidence. Because terrible software isn’t necessarily written by terrible developers. Often, it’s written by good people making reasonable decisions in circumstances that make bad software inevitable. In This Code Is a Crime Scene, we’ll follow the clues from bad code back to the organisation that produced it — and discover why fixing the code without understanding what killed it can leave you with another body two years later. Three key takeaways * Examine the evidence: recognise when technical problems point to deeper organisational problems. * Establish the motive: understand why bad technical decisions were made before trying to fix them. * Prevent the next murder: change the conditions that created the mess, not just the code they produced.
Nick Cousins
Nick Cousins has spent nearly two decades building software, leading technical teams and occasionally wondering how everything got quite so complicated. He began his career as a software developer before becoming a technical lead, manager, CTO and eventually founding his own software company. Today, he works as an independent software developer and consultant, helping organisations untangle the people, process and technical problems that get in the way. He is particularly interested in what happens where software and people collide: how teams make decisions, how organisations shape the systems they build, and why perfectly sensible people sometimes produce completely baffling code. Nick lives in Belfast, is an enthusiastic reader of murder mysteries, and remains cautiously optimistic that the next rewrite will fix everything.