I seem to have a 3 year window during which I hate the code and then I come back and think, "wow, that's pretty nice code, why don't I do code like that any more?". I think I spend a lot of time obsessing over small warts and it takes time for those to recede into the background where they belong.
I hate my code but usually I hate other's code even more. What makes me think my code is not so horrible is when two days after my commit I check commits from my teams on it, and I see their updates nicely integrating the logic I built, proving they understood easily how it is working.
The more I code, the more I do it for other people getting behind, and also the more I "flatten" the code. By that I mean:
- Remove recursions
- Remove pretty hacks
- Split dense logic (one line = one thing)
- Replace comments by properly named function calls
- Factorize everything that is happening more than thrice
- Linearize sequences of steps
- Remove nice to have just in case, but never used function parameters
