If I had a dollar for every time I proposed spending more time on something to make it flexible and able to grow but being told to “hard code it” to save time, I’d have several dollars. If I had a dollar for every time I had to patch that 6 months later, I’d have several more dollars.
You couldn’t pay me enough dollars to cover the therapy caused by having to maintain the “flexible” code that added complexity and abstraction for a single use case that was never expanded to handle more.
Depends on the use case. I used to make websites (~10 years ago) and someone wanted an image scroller and I knew for a fact someone else would want the same thing but with a different number of images showing and maybe instead of clicking next it shows the next image it shows the next 3 images etc. We had piles of very specific scrolling scripts that weren’t flexible and were hard to bring to another site. I spent a bunch of my own time making a single script that could cover most cases and it ended up saving a ton of time and became the go-to script for everyone.
Eventually someone else came in and upgraded the script and made it better before making it a core script. Now with a couple HTML classes (and a little CSS) anything can be a scroller. Options can be changed with a few data attributes.
Sometimes it’s worth it sometimes it’s not. I’ve had things so specific that I coded it like I was robbing a liquor store (get in and out as fast as possible).
Staring down the long barrel of this right now.
But don’t worry it’s just an MVP 🙄
