There’s a funny thing, that when I walk into the kitchen and there’s sunscreen on the counter that I left there before yesterday’s bike ride, there’s a plate that I put to soak on the counter and there’s a book about Klimt that I had hoped to read with my coffee, this is fine.
It doesn’t feel messy. I almost feel a comforting sense of continuity with my past self.
But when other people leave crab rangoons and cups and bowls and mail and washcloths lying around, ugh! mess!
It’s somehow different when I have the story behind it.
Code is like this too. If I remember writing it, then I know this nutty interface name was a placeholder. This ratty console.log helped me debug a tricky crash. I’m in the process of refactoring to use the new functions, but the old ones are still around some places.
When that’s anyone else’s code, it looks like trash.
This tells me: if the code is my own toy, and I’m likely to be back to it before I forget who I was when I wrote it, then all those intermediate states are fine. They might help me get back into this groove, even.
But if the code is shared, or if I won’t be back in it later this week, make small changes completely. One at a time, in series, so that each commit leaves the code clean. Put the sunscreen on and put it away. Wash the plate and put it in the dishwasher immediately. Take my coffee upstairs to drink with the book.
Sometimes I wish I lived alone, so I’d only have my own mess to deal with. I don’t want to code alone, though, except on toy projects. I do wish I lived with people who cleaned up after themselves. I resolve to make smaller messes in our shared code, one at a time.