CNTL’d development
Given my standard practice of ‘code now, think later,’ (I will call this ‘CNTL’ to rival the other acronyms to describe coding techniques) I tend to write code the quick and dirty way, telling myself that if I need to go back to it later to clean it up I’ll do so when i have the time and it becomes necessary. Of course, I never have the time and rarely is it necessary. I do realize the importance of DRY and code portability, and as my skills as a web developer have improved, I have made the natural progression from learning the programming language to learning programming techniques. I now sit here exploring the web realizing I want to learn about design patterns (especially MVC frameworks, and specifically Symfony and Rails), version control, test-driven development, and IDEs for OS X. Where to begin?
Also, can I get a quick show of hands of how often a developer wants to scrap their whole project and start over? For this very reason I like taking on new projects, because I get a clean slate and get to put into practice all of the new things I learned from my last project.