Last evening, like many evenings before, I was working on my image collection App “Atsumeru”. I have been working on syncing for a while, but haven’t been satisfied anymore with various things inside the App.

During the evolutionary process since the initial release, many things have changed on our iPhones and features where added. When working on a side-project, progress is sometimes slow and often it is more important to get the App “out there” instead of iterating over the code too often, or spend a huge amount of time writing more generically. After all, what use is the most beautiful code, if it is never going to end up in a product being used by actual people?

So I figured it would be the better choice to sit down a few evenings and rewrite the App from scratch, getting rid of all the accumulated garbage. The time was perfect for this, as I was able to rewrite it using Swift 2 during the process, which made for a very interesting experience. The reduced amount of code makes it much faster to try out new things and much easier to keep the whole picture of the code. As I am now about to get back to tackling sync, the renewed code base makes this so much, much easier.

Whenever you find yourself cursing over a bad code base, or just found a much better way to achieve something you have already implemented but can’t be satisfied for some reason it might make sense thinking about rewriting the thing. You will learn a lot during the process and usually end up with a much better thing afterwards to base future work on.