On his Medium.com blog Andreas Creten has written up a post that tries to answer the question "Does code need to be perfect?" As developers we have a drive to take pride in our work and want it to be the best code possible. However, that can lead to some bad practices...

In the past months I have asked myself a lot why we always strive to write perfect code. Picking up coding again for an internal project made me realise our team (and probably a large part of the rest of the software development world) spend a lot of time on writing perfectly formatted, ordered, patterned and tested code. But is this really necessary?

[...] The engineers want to write perfect code using the latest techniques, make sure that the code is well documented so they can fully understand how everything works and that it has tests so they can easily update things later. Product owners on the other hand just want things to be done, fast and cheap, so they can ship new features or convince new clients. How can you make these conflicting views work together?

He offers a few different suggestions for those developers wanting to craft the perfect codebase including coding for "now" not the future and the fact that "perfect code" just doesn't exist. He offers some suggestions for dealing with that "non-perfect code" you come across in your codebase, when starting from scratch makes sense and thinking about how "perfect" the code needs to be at the outset.