Hot cup of Breakfast Blend at 8 AM; this cup makes the most stable code.
It usually just comes from a K Cup in an off-brand Keurig. It’s made while you blearily scroll through your phone, checking the latest news. You pour in maybe too much creamer, and now the coffee tastes watered down. But it get’s the job done. After gulping down the first half of the mug, you can fix the bug that had you banging your head into your keyboard the night before. The code is clean, readable, and reliable. There might not be unit tests, or documentation. But it works.
Iced Latte in the afternoon; Maybe you make a run to the closest coffee shop over lunch, or maybe you’re on of the lucky ones that have an “over ice” feature on their coffee machine. This is when things kick into gear. You are kicking butts, and taking names. Your code is the most cleanly designed code it could be, quite possibly over-engineered. You used the factory design pattern for who knows what reason — but it made a lot of sense at the time. You spelled out all the acronyms because we hate acronyms.
A warm late afternoon pick me up; Typically not as strong as the morning cup, but just a warm, comfy, cup to get you enough caffeine to focus for the last hour few hours of work. Now you’re coasting through your afternoon. You’re taking your time. Cleaning up any mess you made prior. Making sure you got all the TODOs done, no trailing white spaces anywhere, removing any unnecessary complexity, adding unit tests. Life is good.
Cold, stale late-night coffee; After adding those unit tests, you realize nothing is actually working. While focusing on troubleshooting, you neglect the last half of your warm, late afternoon pick me up and it is now in its final evolution, now becoming cold and stale. You have been banging your head on the keyboard again. A gulp of the cold coffee jolts you awake, and you swear to follow Test Driven Development practices tomorrow.