Nobody cares about your clean code
"throw the first one away"<p>When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, I don't write tests, I don't comment/document much, I use lots of shitty variable/type names, lots of commented out code, debugging printfs, not much organization of files (often one large file).<p>The prototype software is write-once, read-maybe. Maybe I'll want to see what I did down the road, but more likely I'll be shortly rewriting what I did somewhere else, using the fresh state still in my head.<p>That next thing? If it's meaningful in any way and I want other humans (or future me) to expose their sight-orbs to it, then it'll be "clean code" to the best of my ability. While users won't care what your code looks like, they DO care about bugs, new feature turnaround, and downtime, all of which are exasperated by shitty code. You don't want to be staying up late on the weekend unfucking something you fucked up three years ago.<p>Don't write shitty code for other people. That includes future-you.