I took up pottery six months ago, and the first thing they make you do isn’t throwing. It’s wedging. You take your lump of clay and knead it — press, fold, turn, again, fifty times — until the air bubbles are gone and the density is even all the way through. There’s no pot at the end of it. It’s just the clay, but smooth, consistent, and ready.
Skip it and here’s what happens. A trapped air bubble expands in the kiln and blows your pot apart, sometimes taking the neighbors’ pots with it. Uneven clay won’t center, and clay that won’t center can’t be thrown. The whole thing is decided before you’ve done the part most folks would call pottery.
I had a lesson recently where I couldn’t pull my walls up — they kept going lopsided and thin in the wrong places. I figured it was my hands. My mentor watched for about ten seconds and traced it all the way back to my centering. The walls were never the problem, my prep was.
I think about this constantly at work now.
Start with the data model. Get the shape right and features practically fall out for free — the structure already saw them coming. Get it wrong and you spend the project writing adapters to apologize for a decision you made before you understood the problem. The clay was uneven. The walls pull crooked no matter how good your hands are.
Same with the names I pick on day one — they outlive everything. processData becomes a junk drawer. My utils folder is still load-bearing three years later and nobody dares touch it. None of this hurts immediately. It waits until the code is spinning fast, then throws it off-center.
And same with all the boring setup. Linting, types, a test suite that runs fast and stays green. It ships to nobody, and it decides whether the next thousand commits are pleasant or a slog.
No user has ever seen my data model. Most of my coworkers won’t either. The people who notice this work are the other practitioners — the ones who’ve been throwing long enough to watch ten seconds of wobble and tell you it started at the bottom. The masters can see your wedging in your walls.
So wedge your clay.