[stinos]

When I try to just "code" it ends up being poorly designed and written.

this. Not really important for small and/or personal projects, but for anything beyond that simply spitting out code ends up in a bad design violating SOLID and everything else out there, more often than not. After I figured that out, "code" now actually for me means something along the lines of "think about how components should cooperate with a minimum dependency, [enter rest of SOLID and everything else out there here], then start spitting out the tiniest functional pieces needed to implement it from the bottom up". Might not work for everyone, but it has done wonders for me. Especially the more my knowledge/experience about the first part grows (i.e. thinking about design upfront), the better the second part (i.e. spit out actual code gets), and the more proud I am of it. Heck, code from past two weeks is actaully a new personal record for me. So beautiful and well-cratfed :]. Then again, I thought the same thing about a piece I wrote 6 months ago. And the same goes for the way I use all other tools in the build process actually.