Software Development Lesson from Video Games: Side Quests

A software developer draws a parallel between skipping side quests in video games and deferring small code improvements during development. Just as unfinished side quests leave a game feeling incomplete, deferred refactors, tightened tests, and naming fixes accumulate into technical debt. The key insight is that small improvements are cheapest when handled in context — while you're already working in that part of the codebase — rather than deferred to a later cleanup pass that rarely happens.