I spoke at StirTrek a few weeks ago and they did me the service of recording my talk. It is entitled jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions: Working with Legacy JavaScript and I present it here for your perusal.

The talk consists of a discussion on where legacy code comes from, some good strategies for dealing with it, some bad strategies to avoid, and lots of specific techniques more specific to JavaScript.

The slides for this talk are on SlideShare and, given that there is a lot of code on them, they might be a handy reference. Check ‘em out.

In preparation for this talk I put together an exercise foolishly thinking I might have time during the talk to actually do some coding to provide some more concrete examples. I ran out of time but the exercise is still out there if you want to practice some of these techniques.

I also plan to record a series of screencasts where I show off some of these techniques against this repository. Watch for those here or on my YouTube channel.