
Ask HN: What software engineering rules have you broken to get the job done? - thorin
Sure you should always write tests, be agile, don&#x27;t repeat yourself, use patterns.<p>I often find myself working on different technologies &#x2F; languages &#x2F; projects where I&#x27;m not always aware of the best tooling or practices and don&#x27;t have people I can ask for help.<p>I tend to fall back on a top down approach, build something that fails and iterate, read some documentation or existing code and modify and generally hack it out. I know I&#x27;m not engineering stuff in the best way but it usually gets the job done and I&#x27;m guessing this is pretty common among people who are jack-of-all-trades rather than a c# web services developer or a JavaScript React UI developer for example...<p>I still try to make stuff fairly easy to maintain, document stuff and write a few tests, but I&#x27;m definitely not doing tdd implementing state machines for every bit of logic, using DI everywhere etc etc<p>Maybe you have some interesting stories...
======
1996
Same, divide and conquer by iterating a lot.

I can't write tests if in a hurry, and if the structure of the code gets to
messy, but I catch and handle exceptions I find and the ones I can think
about.

Later it proves useful when refactoring

------
mosalarynolife
All of them, often with management approval and blessing.

Technical debt has always been great job security :^)

