Building a Foundation

It's been said that pharmaceutical companies produce drugs for pennies per pill - except the first pill, which costs millions. Things aren't so different in the land of software development: the first usage of some new functionality might take hours, building the foundation and related pieces. But it could be re-used a hundred times trivially, and usually expanded or modified with little effort as well (assuming it was well-written to start with).

This is precisely what you should be aiming for: take the time to build a foundation that will turn complex tasks into trivial ones as you progress. This is the main purpose behind design concepts like the single responsibility principle, the Hollywood principle, encapsulation, DRY, and so on.

This isn't to be confused with big upfront design; in face, it's especially important to keep these concepts in mind in an agile process, where you're building the architecture as you go. It can be tempting to just hack together what you need at the moment. That's exactly what you should be doing for a prototype, but not for real development. For lasting functionality, you should assemble a foundation to support the functionality you're adding now, and similar functionality in the future.

It can be difficult to balance this against YAGNI - you don't want to build what you don't need, but you want to build what you do need in such a way that it will be reusable. You want to save yourself time in the future, without wasting time now.

To achieve a perfect balance would require an extraordinary fortune teller, of course. Experience will help you get better at determining what foundation will be helpful, though. The more experience you have and the more projects you work on, the better sense you'll have of what can be done now to help out future you.