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Not if you have a hard deadline and your client is launching a massive advertising campaign for your product in a few hours. Also if your project is part of a promotional campaign, it will be up for a few months and then the whole thing will be torn down forever - You don't want to over-engineer it.

I only worked briefly in the digital agency space, it wasn't my thing. My workflow very much adheres to the points described in the article but I wouldn't say that they necessarily reflect all that it means to be a 'Master programmer'.



It seems highly unlikely that nothing would be reusable across campaigns. Identifying the commonalities and isolating them into subprojects that you build out in small increments would seem to be a benefit.

In fact, I've been to a presentation by a digital agency on how they did exactly that and improved the time-to-launch on new projects as a result.

Besides, you don't want to overengineer anything. Refactoring will happen, so the design can be deliberately minimal at the start if proper refactoring practices can be applied.


If, by your original comment, you meant that if your project is simple enough you can muddle through like this, whereas with a large project you can't, I agree with you. But just because bad design doesn't scale up, does not mean that good design doesn't scale down.

The bottom line is good design is fractal. You absolutely need it to achieve the largest scale, but it pays dividends at any scale. While it's true there are a lot of cases where it doesn't matter, doing so will never make you a master programmer any more than chainsawing a log to make seats around a fire pit will make you a master carpenter.




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