Whenever you are in the situation of having the choice to rush to a working milestone or put some extra-effort into ‘doing it right’ take a moment to think. Sure, there are deadlines, but there is also the deadline after the deadline. Putting all your effort in reaching an early first deadline will earn you some extra-cash, but the same cash you have to reinvest to re-structure and re-build your code. Next time when you are in the situation of planning a new milestone try to insert some extra time for ‘doing it right’. If you are the manager get your team motivated by giving them a week for cleaning up the code. It will help future releases, make the programming experience for your workers more enjoyable and maybe even find a bug or two.
Grow organically!

Myself I’ve just decided to properly implement the whole layout thing which is essential to any user interface once it reaches a certain complexity. When you have to deal with multiple objects on the screen and maybe even multiple resolutions you have to have a layout class which updates the positions and sizes of the windows accordingly. Hard coding the positions in your database (or even code) is a swift solution but it will bite you the first time you want to ‘also support his other system’. Especially in the time of the web and mobile devices you have to be very flexible. “Hey, let’s port this to our mobile phone, how long will it take? A day or two? You *just* have to change those widths and heights…”