You write a working prototype.
You begin refactoring the code.
Your manager says “Don’t bother. It’s working. Why waste time rewriting when you could be making something new? Any competent programmer should be able to spend time and understand the code.”
You respond with “Sure. The next time you ask me to make a presentation, I’ll present my very first draft. All the relevant information will be in the slides, and any competent person in the audience should be able to extract it.”
A reminder that we don’t write programs for the computer, but for the human who has to read the code.
Also relevant:
Start working on the feature at the beginning of the day. If you don’t finish by the end of the day, delete it all and start over the next day. You’re allowed to keep unit tests you wrote.
If, after a few days, you can’t actually implement the feature, think of what groundwork, infrastructure, or refactoring would need to be done to enable it. Use this method to implement that, then come back to the feature.
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