How to code

Over the years I've tried different ways of developing my code:

• Mindless coding: write code as you need to make it work, with no tests, documentation or any quality measure.
• TDD.
• Try to abstract everything to minimize the duplication of code between projects.

Each has it's advantages and disadvantages. After trying them all and given that right now I only have short spikes of energy and time to invest in coding my plan for new programs is to:

• Make the minimum design effort to solve the problem at hand. This design will be represented in an orgmode task.
• Write the minimum code to make it work without thinking of tests or generalization, but with the domain driven design concepts so the code remains flexible and maintainable.
• If tests come to your mind, sketch them in a test.py file even if they are empty tests.
• Once it's working see if I have time to improve it:
• Create the tests to cover the critical functionality (no more 100% coverage).
• If I need to make a package or the program evolves into something complex I'd use this scaffold template.

Once the spike is over I'll wait for a new spike to come either because I have time or because something breaks and I need to fix it.

If the code to edit is already at production quality level and has tests, then do a test for each of the changes with TDD.