The responsibility of starting clean

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

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

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