The most important thing a contractor can do isn't ship fast. It's leave code that doesn't require them.
There's a version of contract work that's good for the contractor and bad for the client: complex, clever code that only the original author fully understands. It looks impressive on delivery. It becomes a liability six months later.
At Luna Lab, we've built a set of practices around a single constraint: everything we ship, a capable developer who didn't build it should be able to read, understand, and modify within a week.
No magic dependencies. Every third-party package must have a clear reason to exist. If we can implement something in fifty lines ourselves, we don't add a dependency. Dependencies are maintenance debt with a third party as co-signer.
Obvious over clever. The smartest code is usually the code that's easiest to read. Sometimes a complex algorithm is the right call — but it should be the exception, not a default mode.
Document the why, not the what. Comments that describe what code does are mostly noise — the code itself does that. Comments that explain why a decision was made, why a particular edge case exists, or why something that looks wrong is actually right — those are valuable.
Environment variables for everything external. No hardcoded API keys, endpoints, or credentials. Not even in development. Getting this right from day one makes handoff dramatically simpler.
Every project we complete includes a handoff document: what the system does, where the parts live, what credentials are needed, what third-party services are integrated, and what the gotchas are. Not a full wiki — just enough that a new developer could deploy a fix without calling us.
The goal isn't to be replaceable. The goal is for the client to own what they paid for. That's the only kind of software agency relationship that scales.