The Responsibility of Starting Clean

While working with code doesn't really feel like looting a car, we all are unconsciously subject to Broken Windows psychology. This makes it important to start a project clean, with as few shortcuts and as little technical debt as possible. Because, as soon as a shortcut creeps in, it acts as a broken window and attracts more shortcuts.

Since software projects are often very expensive and long-running endeavors, keeping broken windows at bay is a huge responsibility for us as software developers. We may even not be the ones finishing the project and others have to take over. For them, it's a legacy codebase they don't have a connection to, lowering the threshold for creating broken windows even further.

There are times, however, when we decide that a shortcut is a pragmatic thing to do, be it because the part of the code we are working on is not that important to the project as a whole, or that we are prototyping, or for economical reasons...