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Agreed. Once you have experience, writing good code takes less time than writing shitty code, even in the short term. Good code is easier to test, easier to reason about and it's easier to work on it as a team. Shitty code is impossible to work on as a team. Only for solo developers. I think shitty code can be fine for bells-and-whistles kind of logic but the foundation has to be carefully thought out. Good code is code which anticipates requirement changes. I disagree with the author of the article that it's not possible to predict the future. You only need to have a very vague idea about different future possibilities in order to be able to design a very good architecture. Compare the shitty code approach to the good code approach when building a very simple front end application: --- Shitty code approach: You happen to know Swift so you just start coding the thing natively in Swift for iOS... Then after 6 months you did a lot of work and you start getting a few users then you figure out that a lot of people are complaining that you don't support Android, so then you start to build the same app again for Android using Android Studio... After 6 months, you roll it out. Then after 1 month users are complaining that the mobile app is unwieldy and they're asking for a web version... You are shocked. You did not see this coming. So then you spend another 6 months building another version of the app with React. Users start complaining that the UI in the web version of the application doesn't match the mobile version... Also, now some users demand a new feature... Now you have to implement it and test 3 times (once for each device), you are wasting huge amounts of resources, your team hates you. You're moving too slow. Your investors decide to cut your funding. Your career is over. Good code approach: After carefully looking through the requirements, you figure out that users will probably want to run the app on desktop, web, Android and iOS... So you look at what frameworks support all these platforms... You decide on VueJS with Electron because it's lightweight, has few dependencies and can run on all platforms including mobile. You decide to use CSS media queries for responsive design because it provides a relatively consistent UX/UI accross different devices. You spend 6 month building the app, you ship. Users start using your product, telling their friends about it (who are using different devices)... Some users point out that a feature is missing... No problem, you develop it once, test it once and ship it to all devices at once. Your users love it. Your employees are happy, your investors are pleased, they invest more. Your career is looking promising. |