The Lone Developer Problem
I have a different take on this. If my project somehow becomes wildly successful and is acquired, the next team is not going to want to maintain my code anyway. How do I know that? Because no one wants to maintain someone else&#x27;s code. No one wants to deal with someone else&#x27;s abstractions and bugs or anything else.<p>100% of the time if it&#x27;s feasible, the next version will be a rewrite of all or a significant portion. Especially for relatively small projects in terms of lines of code, which all of mine are.<p>Now the fact that it&#x27;s plain JavaScript and messy, console.logs all over the place, I would argue, actually helps that new team. Because it makes it easy for them to trash my code. Which they definitely will want to do anyway. Why? Because they don&#x27;t want a back end in JavaScript. Actually they didn&#x27;t want it in TypeScript either. They wanted it in Python.<p>What if it was in Python? Well chances are they wanted it to use a different Python framework. Or actually Rust.<p>But what if the front end was very very well factored React. AND the front end team loves React. Well sorry but it uses React Hooks which they hate. And they really switched to Svelte months ago actually.<p>I would argue the part that matters the most is just not having a lot of code. Which you accomplish by not reinventing the wheel. Another big part is having relatively small functions and low cyclical complexity, and descriptive but not overly long names.<p>So in my mind although my code is a mess on the surface and easy to trash, and could be organized better, it will be easier than average to rewrite they way the want. And easy to trash means less likely to be stuck maintaining someone else&#x27;s code for an extended period of time.<p>What I care about is getting a usable product out that has features that provide value before I run out of money. I could do half the features and MAYBE if I am lucky they won&#x27;t trash my code.. but they will actually be worse off because then they will be stuck maintaining a code base that actually isn&#x27;t using the frameworks they preferred anyway.