[mrisse]

It strikes me as a little absurd to say that taking shortcuts is always a bad idea. Let's look at a few shortcuts you might take.

Allow the page to break if the user's browser does not support websockets If you know that 95% of your target audience uses modern browsers this seems like a reasonable compromise.

Don't write enough unit tests Maybe you're using a library that is difficult to mock. Maybe most of your logic is happening at the db layer. Eventually you may want to thoroughly test this piece of code, but it's a ton of work to mock a database in a meaningful way.

Write a monolithic service instead of a modular one While it's bad to let a single service grow too large, when you're starting out, it can be helpful to write it all out, and _then_ see how it can be broken apart. (It's often hard to foresee everything at the design stage.)

Finally, a lot of code ends up being never used. Nobody cares about well-factored well-tested code that isn't used. Sometimes a dirty version is the quickest way to tell if a project makes sense at all.

[jbooth]

"Maybe you're using a library that is difficult to mock. Maybe most of your logic is happening at the db layer."

At this point, your design is already screwed and borderline-unmaintainable, so yeah, I guess unit tests won't help much. But when people talk about Doing it Right, usually they mean having a codebase that's loosely coupled enough that tests are relatively simple to write.