The Dirty Secret of Clean Code: When Breaking Programming Principles Makes You a Better Developer
by darren horrocksIf you’ve been in software development for more than five minutes, you’ve probably had these acronyms beaten into your head:
SOLID: that five-headed monster of principles that’s supposed to make your code amazing.
DRY: because apparently typing the same logic twice will summon demons or something.
Don’t get me wrong, these principles exist for good reasons! They’ve saved countless developers from nightmare codebases. But here’s the kicker: they’re guidelines, not commandments handed down from the mountain.
When It’s Totally Fine to “Break the Rules”
Look, we’ve all been there. You’re coding away, trying to follow all those fancy principles they taught you, and suddenly you find yourself twisting your code into pretzels just to satisfy some abstract concept like “Single Responsibility” or “Don’t Repeat Yourself.”
And you know what? Sometimes that’s completely unnecessary.
When You Need to Ship Yesterday
Let’s be real: sometimes you just need to get that feature out the door. If you’re staring at a tight deadline and your code works but isn’t perfectly SOLID, guess what? That’s life. Ship it. Fix it later if it causes problems.
When You’re Just Figuring Stuff Out
Early in a project, you barely know what the code needs to do, let alone how to structure it perfectly. Trying to make everything SOLID before you even understand the problem is like buying wedding rings on a first date.
When Perfect Code Means Perfectly Unreadable
I’ve seen codebases where developers followed DRY so religiously that understanding what any function actually did required tracing through fifteen layers of abstraction. Sometimes a little repetition makes code way easier to understand.
When Performance Actually Matters
“But what about the performance hit from all those tiny functions?” If you’re writing code for a toaster with 2KB of RAM, or handling millions of operations per second, sometimes breaking SRP is the right call.
The Real-World Example
Last month, I was working on this dashboard feature. According to SOLID, I should’ve split this one class into like, five different classes with their own interfaces. But you know what? It was one specific feature that wasn’t going to be reused elsewhere. Breaking it apart would’ve just scattered related code for no real benefit.
So I kept it as one chunky class that did several things. Scandalous, I know! But guess what? It works great, everyone understands it, and the world didn’t end.
Finding Your Balance
The secret sauce of being a good developer isn’t memorising rules – it’s knowing when to apply them and when to say “nah, not this time.”
Ask yourself:
- Will this abstraction actually help anyone, or am I just doing it to feel smart?
- Is this code going to change often, or is it pretty stable?
- Will splitting this make it easier or harder for the next person to understand?
- Am I solving real problems or imaginary future ones?
The Bottom Line
Programming principles are like those pirate code guidelines from Pirates of the Caribbean – they’re more like suggestions than actual rules. The end goal is working, maintainable software that solves real problems – not code that wins theoretical purity contests.
Next time you find yourself going through backflips to satisfy some principle, ask yourself if it’s actually making your code better or just making you feel better.
What coding “rules” have you broken lately? Drop a comment – I promise not to report you to the code police!