p.volve makes refactoring easy with CodeSee.

I came into this job on a feature branch that had been written in for six months without being thrown back into the regular release cycle. To further complicate this potential issue, the codebase is written in Go, but the individual who’d written the feature was learning Go on the go—their background was in Java and JavaScript.So, the code is written in an object-oriented, Java-type flavor; it’s definitely not Go. And they’d coded themselves into a corner. I needed an accessible way to visualize our next steps; to be sure my colleague truly understood a better path.

This codebase has well over 80K lines of code—it’s a monolithic repository. I initially used CodeSee personally, just to understand what was happening in the code—to see the relationships across the codebase. I didn’t know the codebase, and there was no documentation. I had to make one massive change at first—a pull request. It was successful, and a huge relief. So, how am I supposed to pass off that massive refactor to someone? It’s unreasonable. So, what did I do? I held a 30-minute meeting with my team using CodeSee and a Review Map Tour to showcase the breadth of relationships we are working with in the codebase.

We completed a 13.5K line refactor; a huge shift. Because I used CodeSee, the CTO finally understood the complexity of what we are taking on. Maps make large refactors possible.