If you’ve been writing code for a significant amount of time, you’re sure to have seen the—anything but godly—“God Method.” It’s a method that performs way too many processes in the system and has grown beyond all realistic logic to become “The Method That Does Everything.”

This single unsightly method can span dozens, if not hundreds, of lines. Sometimes even over 1,000! This type of “ugly code” is an unbearable beast to maintain. This is why it’s considered a “code smell” or anti-pattern.

In this tutorial, we walk through a tangible “God Method” and step through the process to refactor it into something more manageable and human-readable. Our code is written in JavaScript for a Node.js service, but the principles apply to any language.