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Comment by lidHanteyk | Hacker News Reader

That's just how some people are. For what it's worth, I can't look at anything I make and be happy with it; I only see the flaws, omissions, and infelicities. If you can be proud of what you make, then great!

Nobody cares either way, though; code ultimately has its own notion of quality, and human aesthetics are totally unrelated to code quality. We all must learn to think like computers and appreciate code like computers do.

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It depends on what you code. For me there must be three things for me to be proud of some codebase:

  1. I could use my creativity (it was not entirely defined problem which just needed to be translated to code).
  2. I have enough time to make it good, not rushed.
  3. Problem was a little over my current competence level, so I could learn something new.

If you only make CRUD forms day in/day out it's hard to be proud of what you do. Creating map display engine which is more performant than anything you have seen to date IS a thing to be proud of (I'm still proud of that one thing, but it's other firm's internal tool, so I can't show you). Unfortunately, for most developers being able to work on such things is very rare. I had maybe 5 such things over my 20 year career.

I find it differently... I look at the old code and look at the lessons I learned as I wrote items on top of each other... my projects are basically layers on top of each other.

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