An article on HN a while ago posited that 'bad code' is directly correlated to forgetting what the code does over time - not the code quality itself. When you g

An article on HN a while ago posited that 'bad code' is directly correlated to forgetting what the code does over time - not the code quality itself. When you green-field a project, everything is fresh in your memory and the code feels great. When you come back to the exact same code a year later you you've lost your landmarks, there's workarounds you don't remember why they exist, suddenly you hate it, ugh this code is terrible! So you re-write it, making you more familiar with the code again and making it easy to remember - suddenly its good code! I try to keep that in mind when writing my code. Sometimes its comments, sometimes its documentation, sometimes its CleanCode™, sometimes its big blocks of text explaining why the heck a certain class exists, but my approach is "Write it for myself in a year when I can't remember what the hell half this stuff does", using every tool at my disposal to achieve that.