Going back to your old code

It don’t really need much time to re-familiarize myself with old code I’ve written.

Sure I will most probably think that it is terrible¹, but I can be productive in it fairly quickly. I’ve heard people who take a long time to wrap their head around code they haven’t seen in a while even if they`ve originally written it themselves.

The most important thing you can do is to make it clean enough. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it will never be. But there is a difference between perfect code and a mess that you would rather not look at anymore.

It will take longer than just writing it as fast as you can, but the time that you save later on is going to be at least twice what you invested. The only time to go as fast as possible is if you’re just throwing out a prototype and you plan on rewriting it from scratch later,but more often than not these prototypes created to be abandoned end up used and built upon so I tend not to go that route.