My cousin held out the keys to his flashy looking sportscar and said “Do me a favour. If you crash into something with my car and it’s nearly written off, but not quite. Please back up then hit it again, harder, until it really is written off”. I laughed nervously. “yeh, sure. Of course”. Needless to say I returned his car in perfect condition a few hours later.

The architect grinned as he reviewed my design proposal. “Don’t worry about making the code beautiful, just make your changes work without causing extra test cyles. In fact, ugly changes are better. The sooner this code becomes legacy, the sooner we can rewrite it” I laughed nervously. “Sure, of course” He handed back my uml diagram and I went back to my computer to write some code. Beautiful code. Carefully.