From email contact, we moved to an HR interview via phone.

The recruiter talked about the company, and from there we moved on to my experience and how that might fit into their areas of expertise.

This phase seemed to go really well, and the recruiter sent me a Hackerrank test.

Here was where the wheels fell off the wagon. My interviewing skills are a little rusty, and I tried to get a little too clever. While my solutions generated all of the right answers to their test cases, the phrase the recruiter kept repeating was "clean code," and some of mine was not as elegant as it should have been.

Not surprisingly in retrospect, I received a very polite email informing me that they were pursuing other candidates.

How would you define "clean code"?