The title is a quote from Robert C. Martin during a conference talk on clean code. For a long time now (I am getting old) I have followed this approach and it has produced remarkable results. For a bit more than four years I had been responsible for a corporate integration platform. I had built and run it following DevOps principles so that everything was fully automated. No manual maintenance work had been necessary at all, log files were archived, deleted after their retention period etc. This had freed up a lot of time. Time which I used to keep my codebase clean.

Particular focus was put onto the structure. And that had been a really tough job. Much tougher than I anticipated, to be quite frank. But I had paid off. Instead of writing a lot of conventional documentation, the well thought-out structure allowed me to find stuff in a completely intuitive way. Because, believe me, six months after you have written something, you do not remember much about it. But if you need a certain kind of functionality and do not only find the corresponding module immediately, but also from a first look make a correct guess how the parameters are meant to be used, that is truly rewarding.

Having experienced this first hand has greatly influenced my work since then. And I am more convinced then ever, that this is not beautifying for the sake of it. But instead it is a mandatory requirement and a prerequisite for business agility.