There is a key rule that I personally operate by when I’m doing incremental development and design, which I call “two is too many.” It’s how I implement the “be only as generic as you need to be” rule from the Three Flaws of Software Design. Essentially, I know exactly how generic my code needs to be by noticing that I’m tempted to cut and paste some code, and then instead of cutting and pasting it, designing a generic solution that meets just those two specific needs. I do this...
