💠Refactoring tickets must die!
Practices like constant refactoring, testing, and sharing knowledge are part of our daily work, not an afterthought.
I think there is so much poor code out there because we somehow got convinced that things like refactoring and testing are extras. Things that we can do later. They are not! They are part of a professional coding workflow!
Sure, there are times where it can be wise to build up some tech debt to get out a feature as fast as possible. But those are the exceptions, and you have to pay it back eventually!
If we want to do exceptional work, we need to acknowledge that there is more to our job as simply writing code to implement some feature.
Constant refactoring is necessary to keep our code maintainable.
Automated tests are essential to enable constant refactoring and resilient code.
We need to share knowledge about the code we write with teammates, ideally, by practicing pair programming.
Writing a sufficient amount of documentation in the form of meaningful commit messages, decision logs, and written text is essential.
As front-end developers, we have to take care of building UI's with a11y in mind.
All this is part of the job! And make no mistake: those are not separate tasks we can do one after another! With every feature, we implement we need to take care of every one of those bullet points.
If we start adding tickets to our Jira boards for "Refactoring" or "Improve a11y" we should be aware that our process is flawed, and we need to improve it. We must consider those things with every feature we implement!