Depending on what your objectives are, I would argue that code is usually a means to an end, rather than the product. It's great if you enjoy writing beautiful

Depending on what your objectives are, I would argue that code is usually a means to an end, rather than the product. It's great if you enjoy writing beautiful code, but usually shipping it is what counts. It's fun to maintain beautiful code, but there won't be any maintenance if it never ships. As a single developer, the #1 objective (unless you're working on fun/hobby projects) should be to ship, not to consider future maintainability. People have this perception that code "is permanent", which may be the case for code, but not for the environment its sitting in. Everything changes, all the time. Perfect code will be perfect but isolated from its surrounding progress, if not rewritten, thrown away, redone over and over again. In most cases, I'd rather ship a product people use, albeit with horrible code, than glance at my Github repo of beautiful code optimizations that have so far gathered zero interest by the rest of the world.