Being a developer these days involves sometimes developing features and fixing bugs at a fast pace, resulting in code that is difficult to maintain in the long-term. In other cases, we want to make the most elegant solutions possible to solve some problems. This can produce code that machines can understand, but people have more difficulty understanding. Such code can become a major issue for a company to maintain and use in the long run.
Our objective should be to write maintainable, understandable, simple, and readable code, and we need to make an extra effort for this to happen. It should be easy for our colleagues to change and understand the code we create, but this is not easy to achieve, especially in large projects. So we need to practice writing tidy code and fail, fix it, and repeat until we achieve clean code. We can do this by re-writing code as we go, rather than waiting for big refactorings. Another good approach is that we try to type out all our code, rather than copying and amending it, as we often do, as the former results in a better understanding of what we are doing, which helps us produce better and cleaner code.