I really enjoy refactoring. Like, doing it by hand (5 miles uphill in the snow both ways) rather than AI. I don't even understand why I enjoy it, because if done right, there's no visible change. When people ask me why I'm so pumped up after having worked on the codebase all day long, I can't give them any sort of answer that makes sense (coming from a small business with a smaller dev team). It's just... "I'm future-proofing our website and we won't see any direct results today but things will be so much easier going forward..."

There's something about the puzzle. Looking at my old, deranged coding workarounds that tried to solve problems that have already been solved a thousand times before with established paradigms; and then moving them toward said best practices; and doing it in a way that no NEW technical debt is created. It's just satisfying.

I think one of the best learning experiences for me has been the fact that I created a bunch of sloppy shit by hand, auth and all, which forced me to learn things the hard way. All along the way, people were shouting from the rooftops: "use established libraries, dummy!", which is the same advice I would give to somebody today. But by doing things the hard way, I learned so much more about the inner workings. And, I've also given myself a decade's worth of refactoring work, which I really enjoy!