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The Human Side of Clean Code
Your Clean Code Might Be Someone Else’s Technical Debt
Why software patterns must adapt to team size, and how to do it right.
In software development, we face a peculiar paradox: the same architectural decisions that make code cleaner, more maintainable, and more elegant for one team can make it more complex, rigid, and burdensome for others. As organizations scale, the very principles we rely on to keep our code clean can start working against us.
This isn’t just about code patterns or best practices. It’s about how team boundaries transform the fundamental nature of clean code — and why we need to rethink our approach to software design and architecture in growing organizations.
The Human Aspect
Often when we think about code and how to organize and architect it, we do so from a technical perspective: what elements are there, how they interact with each other, and which model will best represent the functionality. All from the perspective of technical perfection, but technique isn’t everything. Code doesn’t exist in isolation; it lives within the team, and it’s just as necessary for the code to adapt to technical requirements as it is to adapt to the needs of the team working with it.
