</> htmx ~ Codin' Dirty

“Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less than your best.” Clean Code

In this essay I want to talk about how I write code. I am going to call my approach “codin’ dirty” because I often go against the recommendations of Clean Code, a popular approach to writing code.

Now, I don’t really consider my code all that dirty: it’s a little gronky in places but for the most part I’m happy with it and find it easy enough to maintain with reasonable levels of quality.

I’m also not trying to convince you to code dirty with this essay. Rather, I want to show that it is possible to write reasonably successful software this way and, I hope, offer some balance around software methodology discussions.

I’ve been programming for a while now and I have seen a bunch of different approaches to building software work. Some people love Object-Oriented Programming (I like it), other very smart people hate it. Some folks love the expressiveness of dynamic languages, other people hate it. Some people ship successfully while strictly follow Test Driven Development, others slap a few end-to-end tests on at the end of the project, and many people end up somewhere between these extremes.

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