The Evil of Messy Code that Kills you Slowly

One little problem that can lead to big trouble

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

I don’t care if the code messy or not, if it works, then we’re good

Maybe we often have a principle like that, especially just before the deadline. Often we just focus on how to make a code work, without realizing what the big problem is behind it.

If we are just at the start of the project or in our first releases, we probably won’t have any significant problems. This problem may only arise when we are in the next releases. If you’ve been a programmer for more than 3 or 4 years, you know what it feels like to be slowed down significantly due to messy code being done by other people.

So without realizing it, sometimes we spend more time tidying up the previous code, rather than adding new features.

So, why is this happening?

Let’s take a look at this developers familiar lie:

We can clean it up later, we just have to get to market first!

I got this sentence from Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)’s Clean Architecture. Sometimes we realize that our code is messy, we are just wrong to prioritize which one is more important. Of course, the code is never taken care of, because market pressures never subside.