Laravel refactoring hell

Miroslav Trnini? writing about taking over a Laravel project:

That code was everything else except human readable and maintainable. Let me be more expressive – it was worst nightmare that can happen to a developer. It was big ball of mud. But very low quality mud – not the mud that you can wash easily – but stinky mud. Almost crap.

I’ve been in this situation before too. It’s painful and it’s hardly Laravel specific. Pick any framework and I can guarantee you will find crap code. We are all creatures of habit and unless we constantly strive to improve we will keep doing things the same way.

He goes on to say:

That leads me to conclusion that the community should somehow consider Laravel certification. All big framework are certified – so why not Laravel ?

I’m not in agreement with this. I’ve seen “certified” devs write just as sloppy code. At the end of the day some developers care about the craft, others don’t. Not much you can do about it. Here is a great quote that sums it up nicely:

It's harder to find someone who cares than it is to find someone who codes.

— Carl Smith (@carlsmith) March 14, 2014

One thing I do think we both agree on is that if you or your company is using Laravel then subscribing to laracasts is a must.