> In a way, this quote is saying “first do what you should have always been doing; being organized” and “then do what you came here to do in the first place (ad

> In a way, this quote is saying “first do what you should have always been doing; being organized” and “then do what you came here to do in the first place (add a feature, fix a bug).” Maybe it's just me, but that's not really how I understand it. Perhaps it's because I generally run into this when I'm thinking about accomplishing something new with a hack. Specifically, I want to do something that was unanticipated in the original design, and "goes against the grain" of what is there now. One solution, as suggested by the above interpretation, is to refactor your codebase in a way that the addition now fits in smoothly. That's a great thing to do a lot of the time. But beware: there isn't a "best" or "perfect" factoring that you can ever reach, no matter how much refactoring you do. There may be some things that are strictly improvements over what came before. But beyond that, a codebase has to optimize for a subset of the possible uses and dimensions of flexibility: what do you want to be easy to change? Your new feature or usage may not be the thing to orient the codebase around. Sometimes, it really is just a one-off, or an experiment, or temporary. In that case, refactoring everything to make it easy is just wrong. The original quote still applies, though. If you inject a hack here, a hack there, you'll quickly end up with a mess. Very often, the better thing to do is to do whatever refactoring is necessary in order to add a general extension mechanism that permits the hack you need, and only then use it to implement the hack. The difference is that the hack will still be messy, it may have hardcoded values, and it may not get along with similar hacks. But its scope is limited and the amount of damage or distortion it can cause to the surrounding design is bounded. I guess fixes are more likely to require refactoring. Features or extensions should be considered very carefully before adapting a large chunk of the system to suit them, which can come at the cost of making it harder to adapt to the original purposes.