Most of you have probably had to work on a dreaded legacy project. Working on that project is no fun; the code is a mess, and you want to find whoever wrote it and find out what they were thinking when they wrote it.

At some point in your career, you have been or will be that person to someone else. We all write code that we will not be proud of later. But why does the code get so bad? When does a project become legacy? Lastly, what can be done to prevent this?