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by PartiallyTyped 955 days ago
Unless the code is running on critical systems that put human lives at risk, good enough is the perfect amount of good.

Getting things done is more important. Excluding above scenario, either you will make mistakes, or you are not tackling meaningful tasks. And that's okay. Allocate time for clean up when there's less ambiguity. The more you explore the problem, the better the issues become.

First implementation will always be bad, so throw it away and build something that's good enough to get the job done and uses what you've learned as you explored the space.

1 comments

Code quality is for developers, not end users. It's fine for code to be atrociously structured if literally no one is ever going to read it, even in medical devices, as long as it works.
As another poster has said, code you no longer touch is dead. Usually, software needs to be maintained and modifying a badly written code is a nightmare scenario. That means that requested features are piling up in the backlog and the resulting mess is growing slower and buggier overtime.
> As another poster has said, code you no longer touch is dead

This is a poorly considered sentiment.