Good Code: 70% Planning, 20% Coding, 10% Review
This might not be the case for everyone, but my experience as a developer and working with my Coop students; I have come to see a clear pattern between the difference between good code and bad code has everything to do with planning.
I was the same when I started learning to code professionally and I see it in my fresh coop students all the time. There's an excitement about getting to work on the company cutting edge projects as compared to the maintenance tickets and there's a drive to just dive in and start typing away to make the platform functional. Makes for a great daydream to start the day. Ends in a nightmare you have on your drive home wondering why it didn't work out as you thought it would.
Planning. It's more than just thinking of the idea and follow through on execution but also doing the research to see how others have done it before and modern best practices. The latter is what most novices in my opinion skip over. I get the excitement, I get it every day when the project moves to the next levels. But my experience down nightmare drive has given me the caution to really think out my plan before executing. Sometimes days are spent just doing research on best practice and how I plan on implementing my solution. Once the research is done, I can usually implement the solution on the first and second try within a day.
You might be thinking from a non-developer perceptive; “Wow… days to complete a feature… that seems absurd”. To which I ask you to compare how many days the dive in method will keep the feature in the debugging state.
Coding and software development is not about typing, but the ability to think through problems and provide scalable solutions that work time and time again with efficiency. That is good code.
