Secrets of rock star programmers

This is a good article that I just read... I especially liked the following question and answer.

I believe it not only applies to software development, but to all aspects of technology. I use the technique that he talks about (quick and dirty, then immediately improve and fix), but just never realized or thought about it. It just seems the most natural way of building or working with technology. You must be careful though to not overlook the improvement part... you have to do it immediately or else you'll never end up having time to go back later to improve it.

Ed: When you're doing your day-to-day work, maybe you are coding or designing or doing technology development, and you have the choice between doing the "right thing" or the "quick thing," how do you motivate yourself to do the right thing?

Rod: I am actually very biased in favor of doing the right course. One thing that I might do is make a deliberate decision as to what gives me the greatest velocity. So, for example, I might do it a quick and dirty way, verify that it works, and then come back and fix it immediately, because it's way easier to improve working code than to do something more complex when you don't have anything working. But, in general, I don't tend to take shortcuts, and one of the whole goals with Spring is to make the right thing easy to do. I mean, I think if you consistently find that the right thing is hard to do, there's something wrong. The right thing should be the right thing partly because it's easy and natural to do. If the right thing is unnatural, that is kind of an environment smell. It's beyond a code smell. It's telling you something.

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