Hi guys!
This week we have a post from one junior developer from Code Of Us - Tea Bilić!
She started with us a year ago and is on a good path from junior to medior developer, hope you enjoy this post!
The High Price of “Just Ship It”
When teams skip planning to hit a deadline, the results are predictable and expensive.
Take the Knight Capital trading firm in 2012. They reused old code for a new deployment without proper testing or impact analysis. In 45 minutes, a glitch triggered millions of erroneous trades. The company lost $440 million, nearly its entire equity. It was sold off in a fire sale days later. That wasn’t a lack of skill, it was rushing without thinking through edge cases or regression risks.
Another classic: the 2013 Healthcare.gov launch. The U.S. government rushed a massive site under tight political deadlines using a waterfall approach (long planning cycles, then one giant release). On day one it crashed under expected traffic. Users saw error pages, incomplete forms and data that never reached insurers. The fix cost taxpayers nearly $2 billion and the project became a textbook case of how poor requirements gathering, insufficient testing and no scalability foresight create chaos.
Smaller-scale versions happen every day in startups and agencies: a founder hires the cheapest freelancer to “just code a quick MVP.” Six months later the app is a spaghetti mess of duplicated logic. Every new feature takes twice as long, bugs multiply and the client ends up paying more to rewrite it than the original build cost.
SOLID Principles: Thinking Before Coding
Robert C. Martin (“Uncle Bob”) didn’t invent SOLID as rigid coding rules, but rather as a mindset for planning how to think before writing a single line. These five principles keep code flexible, readable and scalable.
Here’s each one with a real-life analogy and a practical software example:
S – Single Responsibility Principle
A class (or module) should have only one reason to change.
Real-life: A restaurant waiter shouldn’t also cook, manage inventory and handle payroll since that’s three jobs.
In code: Imagine an OrderProcessor class that validates orders, calculates taxes, sends emails and saves to the database. When tax laws change, you risk breaking email logic. Planning separates these into TaxCalculator, EmailService and OrderRepository. Changes stay isolated and onboarding new developers becomes faster.O – Open/Closed Principle
Software entities should be open for extension but closed for modification.
Real-life: App stores let you add new apps without rewriting the phone’s operating system.
In code: A payment system that hard-codes “only credit cards.” Adding PayPal or crypto means editing core code (and risking breakage). With planning, you define an abstract PaymentGateway interface. New gateways extend it without touching existing code. Netflix and Stripe-style systems rely on this every day.L – Liskov Substitution Principle
Subtypes must be substitutable for their base types without altering program correctness.
Real-life: If you expect a “rectangle” to behave like a rectangle, a “square” that forces equal sides shouldn’t break calculations that assume width and height can differ.
In code: A base Bird class with fly() works for Eagle but fails for Penguin. Planned inheritance (or better, composition) avoids these surprises.I – Interface Segregation Principle
Clients shouldn’t be forced to depend on interfaces they don’t use.
Real-life: A restaurant menu that forces every customer to order dessert, drinks and appetizers even if they only want a main course.
In code: A giant UserService interface with 20 methods. A simple reporting module gets bloated with unused login methods. Segregated smaller interfaces (e.g., AuthInterface, ProfileInterface) keep things clean.D – Dependency Inversion Principle
High-level modules shouldn’t depend on low-level ones; both should depend on abstractions.
Real-life: A CEO doesn’t manage every employee directly, they go through department heads (abstractions).
In code: Code depending on a concrete MySQL class instead of a DatabaseInterface. Switching to PostgreSQL or a mock for tests becomes painless.
Teams that internalize SOLID spend less time debugging and more time shipping value. Code stays readable, testable and scalable.
Architectural Planning, Code Structure, and Scalability
Good architecture isn’t just diagrams, it’s the multi-phase process (feasibility, high-level design, detailed specs) that aligns business goals with technical reality.
Without it: Early Twitter (pre-2013) became famous for the “Fail Whale.” Explosive growth met a monolithic codebase that couldn’t scale. Servers crashed constantly because no one had planned database sharding or load balancing.
With it: Netflix faced a similar crisis in 2008 when DVD-by-mail growth overwhelmed their systems. They deliberately migrated to a microservices architecture, invested in Chaos Engineering (intentionally breaking servers to test resilience) and planned for millions of concurrent users. Today it streams to over 260 million households worldwide with almost no downtime.
Code structure follows the same logic: planned projects emphasize readability (clear naming, small functions), maintainability (modular files), testing (unit + integration coverage) and scalability (horizontal scaling hooks). A rushed e-commerce app might store everything in one giant app.js file. A planned one uses clean folders, dependency injection and event-driven patterns so Black Friday traffic doesn’t melt the servers, like Shopify learned the hard way in 2019 when poor reactive scaling caused outages and millions in lost sales.
The Two Mindsets: “Just Code It” vs. Planned Development
Iterative “just code it”: Start coding immediately, let the code give feedback. Great for tiny experiments, but hidden assumptions surface as 3 a.m. production fires.
Planned development: Upfront analysis, architecture spikes and SOLID thinking. It feels slower at first, maybe 20–30 % more time in week one, but prevents months of rework.
Spotify famously dedicates significant time to planning and architecture reviews and the result is one of the highest on-time delivery rates in the industry.
What Happens When You Skip Planning
Scope explosion: Features pile up with no boundaries. Deadlines slide.
Rework and waste: The same task is done three times because requirements were vague.
Team confusion: Developers don’t see the big picture, so they write quick hacks instead of thoughtful solutions.
Business damage: Clients lose trust. Agencies get bad reviews. Burnout skyrockets.
What Changes When You Do Plan
You think seven steps ahead. Clients pay less overall because mid-project changes become cheap extensions instead of painful rewrites. Bugs drop dramatically. Downtime disappears. Adding features later is straightforward. The product feels stable and professional.
In short, planning is the cheapest insurance you can buy. The question isn’t “Can we afford the time to plan?” It’s “Can we afford the chaos if we don’t?”.
If you’re a founder, agency owner or developer choosing your next project partner, look for the team that asks smart questions before they touch the keyboard. That upfront conversation is where the real value begins. The cheapest bid almost never wins in the long run, but the smartest plan almost always does.