Ask HN: What software engineering rules have you broken to get the job done?

Sure you should always write tests, be agile, don't repeat yourself, use patterns.

I often find myself working on different technologies / languages / projects where I'm not always aware of the best tooling or practices and don't have people I can ask for help.

I tend to fall back on a top down approach, build something that fails and iterate, read some documentation or existing code and modify and generally hack it out. I know I'm not engineering stuff in the best way but it usually gets the job done and I'm guessing this is pretty common among people who are jack-of-all-trades rather than a c# web services developer or a JavaScript React UI developer for example...

I still try to make stuff fairly easy to maintain, document stuff and write a few tests, but I'm definitely not doing tdd implementing state machines for every bit of logic, using DI everywhere etc etc

Maybe you have some interesting stories...