"I learned to write, clear, maintainable code the hard way. For the last twelve years, I've made my living writing computer games and selling them over the Net using the marketing technique that was once charmingly known as shareware. What this means is that I start with a blank screen, start coding, and, a few tens of thousands of lines of code later, I have something to sell.
"This means that, if I make a stinky mess, I'm doing it in my own nest. When I'm chasing down a bug at 3 a.m., staring at a nightmare cloud of spaghetti code, and I say, 'Dear God, what idiot child of married cousins wrote this garbage?', the answer to that question is 'Me...'"