I found that a big jump in my quality of design was when I started thinking about what state was necessary, what transformation needed to be done, and by what e

I found that a big jump in my quality of design was when I started thinking about what state was necessary, what transformation needed to be done, and by what entity. Before that, I used to code for the task at hand, and create data structures mostly for the task at hand. Thinking about what each program might need to know and in what format relative to it's role just made things smoother. It wasn't a large leap conceptually, but the mental model change came from a long lost hacker news comment along similar lines.