It&#x27;s been my experience that clever architecture tends to beat clever coding and tactics.<p>I don&#x27;t think I started to have an idea of what being a better programmer was, until I had a relationship with multiple code bases that I had started or built and were 5-7 years old.<p>What came from it?<p>- idea of being kind to your future self,<p>- coding in a way that the next person could quickly pick up on it vs building a tribute to my own cleverness<p>- not prematurely optimizing<p>- refactoring being expected<p>- learning to solve all sorts of small and not-small problems<p>- being open to the idea that few problems haven&#x27;t been thought about or solved already