[aristofun]

Witnessing and dealing with some mess among other things helps to understand few unpleasant but important to swallow pills:

1. Code is not an asset, it’s a liability

2. Code is not a piece of art its a plumbing behind the scenes. It doesn’t has to be fancy and elegant. But it must be effective and both easy and cheap to maintain.

3. Most engineers engineer for the sake of it, and this leads to a mess.

4. Most important code quality metrics is a team scalability. Optimizing code for maintainability and simplicity is way more important and profitable than optimizing for anything else.

I think as with any taste it can’t be learned explicitly. It’s an accumulation of many real world examples of good and bad decisions.

But something you can accelerate by jumping on a harder problems and diving into larger projects.