Your code may be elegant, but mine works

Since reading code is infinitely harder than writing code, the next step that clever coders need to think of is not for themselves, but for others who will continue to work on what they do if they truly want to be working on other new and interesting things.

I haven't found my code gets to be automatically "hacky" if it "works" and isn't obsessed with elegance first. It's usually simpler and approachable by a greater number of decent programmers that can continue on it.

97% of the time the performance worries we have will never come to fruition, software rarely gets that kind of pressure, and very few frameworks (I hope) are that brutal.

Hiding what I do in a clever line of code that slows someone else from improving it, or taking a small 10-40 ms hit for something far more readable and editable. If it's a part of the logic that needs further optimization later, it's ready and willing be improved easily.

One stinking reality is software is just like hardware -- it will always hit its limits and fail. You can be reasonably kind to your future self, but not really prematurely optimize everything before it happens, and instead of making our own lives easier as developers, it should really be about the end users first.

I think we all understand that spaghetti code simply adds time to the next feature we want to introduce, probably creates unseen bugs, and might explode. But it's always a balance and nothing is black and white.

I hear a lot of "you're wrong, do it the right way first!" but you gotta balance "the right way" with its context. Code isn't made for code's sake, it's made to do something (like a business objective, like "be able to order a book through my browser"). Businesses are trying, first and foremost, to make profit, however they need to do that. Beautiful code has nothing to do with that goal, but is sometimes a means to that end.

If the code achieves the business objective it was meant to achieve, it's doing its job (however minimally). Customers don't care what the code looks like (if they look at it). They just care that it does what they need to do (like order a book). Businesses don't care what the code looks like as long as it makes profit.

Secondary to the business objective is how that code fits into the greater context of the system-as-a-whole. Obviously badly written code is going to accrue technical debt, which will likely lead to cumulative delays to new features, cause things to break, etc. The extra effort involved in dealing with that debt is obviously going to cost something, which will have an affect on the primary goal of business: profit. But also delaying a feature, to "do it right the first time", that could be earning revenue, is also going to affect profit. The key is to balance it to maximize profit overall.

When I do anything (code, draw, write, cook, paint, dance, whatever) I start by doing it the simple, easy, fast way; I probably fuck it up; then I iterate and try to improve upon it and refactor. Usually in getting something out there I discover new solutions that I would not have seen had I not actually made something and put it into the world where I could look at it and point to it and talk about it with other people. Being an early mover aside, I think this kind of process helps overall quality anyway. And in the meantime I've got something that's at least doing something.

I think Joe Armstrong knows what he's talking about ;)