I’d like to start easy and say that threading is really hard. It adds a dimension to a program that is just hard to keep in mind all the time. For that is exactly what you have to do, keep it in the back of your head, no mater how small the code change is. Threads are like people travelling on subways. The subways are the shared memory that we all want to use. During rush hours thousands of deadlocks occur from people blocking each other when trying to get on and off.

A few times during my time as a consultant I’ve been asked to help clean up code or re-architect code that have become hard to maintain. This has given me some insight of how to deal with legacy code and where to begin the untangling of complex code. I’ll give, what I think are good practices as well as some good tips for not creating complex code in the first place.