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Comment by milkey_mouse | Hacker News Reader

> It wouldn't be acceptable in a well managed company so I don't understand why side projects would get a pass to become sloppy.

Because no one's paying you, and you owe your users nothing?

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> Because no one's paying you

While I'm certainly getting there, I'm not cynical enough to believe being paid is the only reason to take pride in the quality of your work.

Ha! I practice good commit hygiene---even when no one's paying me---because it's useful to my future self, but I don't think pride in one's work (especially through importing workplace best practices) is a great reason, especially not a normative one. I think this is like the proverbial carpenter finishing the back of a drawer though no one will see it. It's done for the carpenter's sake, out of principle or mundane Calvinism, and I wouldn't begrudge a carpenter who didn't. And the latter might sell more furniture.

But yeah, if someone made a cabinet with fancy Japanese joinery that turns out to be inkjet AI-generated veneers over glue and nails... I would not buy it.

I don't think that's the idea; it's more that when you're not beholden to an employer, you can focus on (and take pride in) whichever aspects of the work you want to focus on. When I'm working on my own projects, most of the pride I take in my code is based on what it does -- not on how clean it is, and certainly not on how well organised is the repository it lives in.

Yes, sometimes that makes things harder in the long run, but on the other hand there may not be a long run for this project if I try to force myself to do all the tedious bits 'correctly'. (And 99% of the time what bites me is my sloppy coding practices; it's very rare for much to hinge on the quality of my commit messages.)

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