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> a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place

How many programmers have the luxury to organize the code in the way that exactly suit them? most of the time, I work on code I didn't write myself. In the past, I used to try to refactor but I grew tired of having to justify why it's useful. Nowadays, I just deal with the code the best I can, and LSP is a big help.




I do think - my pet theory - there is two sorts of « good » code :

- The solo programmer’s code : it’s smart, small, straightforward, does what it needs to do and it benefits from being able to fit in the author’s head but it would be a team’s nightmare, hard to add unanticipated features.

- The team’s code : it’s verbose, full of boilerplate, follows strict programming patterns and rules, is easier to modify/add features. Anyone in the team can add or maintain parts but give it to a solo programmer and it would become a nightmare to just maintain.

For a long time in my career, I opposed the two. Being too straightforward and not strict enough in a team setting is often a recipe for disaster in the long term. In the contrary, being too professional in your solo project is often the way to abandon it.

Being able to write those two types of code is an incredible skill - that I mostly don’t have.


I’m sorry to say that some of the gnarliest and most boneheaded codebases I worked on were ones where I was the ‘architect’.

It was a startup environment and hectic, but I had total control over everything, more or less.

Just to say that having the luxury of a greenfield start doesn't mean you'll end up with a nice result.




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