Thoughts about software development

I've had my DIY home automation system for controlling outlets and reading sensor data running for about two years now. The system has been working fine and I haven't had any need to touch the code since I added the sensor reading to it, until a few months back. Need for new functionality Few months ago I got a new IoT toy for a lend from a friend until I'd get my own toys, a ruuvitag sensor beacon. Ever since I found the ruuvitag for the first time from kickstarter I had the idea of getting a bunch of ruuvitags and adding their weather station sensor readings as part of my home automation system. The original home automation backend included only tellstick compatible devices and was written in Python, and in my mind it was kind of a hack. The ruuvitag beacons communicate via BLE i.e. Bluetooth Low Energy and that meant that I needed to add functionality to read the beacon data via bluetooth. I found a ruuvitag Python library and initially thought that I'd just...