Sometimes it’s good to just hack. Don’t worry about scalability or maintainability, don’t sweat coding standards, ignore DRY but mutter YAGNI as often as possible – just duct tape things together as you think of them.

It’s like sketching, but instead of a pencil you have a text editor. You pop around the control flow tweaking bits and dropping little #todo’s when you get an idea that might be worth pursuing… but later. Just jot it down in a comment so you don’t get snagged on the niceties at the margins.

It’s the kind of code you don’t plan to show off.

It’s code written in the clumsy accent of someone just learning the language.

Sometimes your code talks its way around a problem and back again. Then you see the loop and snip it off and suddenly you understand something about your program that you didn’t before.

You write empty functions all in a row like setting rocks in a circle before you build a campfire. You’re just getting your bearings and it helps you to see the functions there.

You worry that it’s going to get away from you.

Instead of worrying, you knock out the next bit.

And then, all of a sudden, it starts coming together.

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