Reconciling bleeding-edge scientific results and reproducible research may seem a conundrum in our fast-paced high-pressure academic world. I discuss the practices that I found useful in computational work. At a high level, it is important to navigate the space between rapid experimentation and industrial-grade software development. I advocate adopting more and more software-engineering best practices as a project matures. I will also discuss how to turn the computational work into libraries, and to ensure the quality of the resulting libraries. And I conclude on how those libraries need to fit in the larger picture of the exercise of research to give better science.