Race for green OR get things working early

When I start on a feature my primary goal is to get it all working. I don’t care about how the frontend looks, I don’t care about how performant it is. I don’t care how bad my method names are. I just need it to work.

People are always saying “The code is the easy part” and while that’s true, its still really hard. Until I get something working all the way through, in an ugly fashion I have a huge ball of tension in my stomach.

Once its working you can them make it better. You can even start from scratch again. But now you have a better picture of what needs to be done. Now you have less things to trip you up. Finishing something takes ages. I like to finish an awful version as quickly as possible so all we’re doing is making it better.

The naming of this was inspired by “Shameless Green” from the wonderful “99 bottles of OOP” book.