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Five coding hats

coding hatsFebruary 3, 2025 Early in my career, I was convinced there was “good code” and “bad code”. That you could look at something and — without knowing anything about the context — pass judgement on it.

Before I showed him the code, I felt the need to give some disclaimers: “This is deliberately written in a very minimal style”, “I was going for the simplest possible thing that could work”, stuff like that. The scrappy hat is about keeping things lean — taking the straightest possible path to your goal, and skipping the ceremony. Sometimes I’ll use this in a time-boxed way — once I’ve got the basic functionality working, I might “put on my chef’s hat” for thirty minutes and see if I can clean the code up a bit.

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