> I suggest to think deeply about what you mean when you say “clean” or “dirty”.
I'd go one step further: I suggest to think deeply. Period. I used to think I was a slacker for taking one or two hours to go for a stroll during a work day, thinking hard about my code, my problems, the architecture, the abstractions... and daydreaming as well.
I had to shut down my inner Jiminy boss who was telling me that an hour with no code written was an hour lost. And I am still occasionally bad at it.
In the last project I did, there was a strong deadline, so I went straight into coding, went into two dead-end before backtracking and changing the approach totally. Probably could have been saved by some hard thinking at the beginning.
Balancing thinking and doing is one of the Hard Problems™ of software development. I suspect successful methodologies work because they formalize the act of thinking about the code before implementing it. And that when methodologies fail the reason could be that they can easily be implemented such that people think more about the technicalities (assigning work, deadlines, estimation accuracy etc.) than the development (modularity, overlap with existing work, conflicts with concurrent work, security, third party dependencies etc.).
I'd go one step further: I suggest to think deeply. Period. I used to think I was a slacker for taking one or two hours to go for a stroll during a work day, thinking hard about my code, my problems, the architecture, the abstractions... and daydreaming as well.
I had to shut down my inner Jiminy boss who was telling me that an hour with no code written was an hour lost. And I am still occasionally bad at it.
In the last project I did, there was a strong deadline, so I went straight into coding, went into two dead-end before backtracking and changing the approach totally. Probably could have been saved by some hard thinking at the beginning.