It seemed like a good idea at the time by Tessa Thornton.
From the post:
I was reading through some of the on-boarding docs my first day at Shopify, and came across a reference to something called the “Retrospective Prime Directive”, which really appealed to me (initially because Star Trek):
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
This made me think of something I’ve been reminding myself of a lot over the past year, which started out as a joke but I’ve come to think of it as my own directive when it comes to reading other people’s code: It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Tessa’s point that understanding what someone was trying to accomplish, as opposed to mocking their efforts, is more productive is useful.
Not only can it lead to deeper understanding of the problem but you won’t waste time complaining about your predecessors being idiots.
I first saw this in a tweet by Julie Evans.