I came across a very interesting article this week and wanted to share some of the details with you here on Developer Pro.
First let me say that I have not been and do not expect to ever be a developer. I have poked around with some BASIC back in the days I had my Commodore 64, HTML as I learned the web stuff, and have even used wizards & drag/drop interfaces to build simple Windows apps. I can also dig out the places where HTML is used to create pages in PHP code such as that for WordPress and its library of plugins.
So basically I know enough to be dangerous inside of code.
However, I will say this - what has helped me in the past to be less dangerous is good clean commented code that helped me understand what is happening.
Well all of my past tinkering in code flashed back into my mind as I came across an article by Christos Matskas, a software engineer and the founder of SoftwareLounge. It was published on the TechNet UK Blog by Chris Walden.
"Writing clean, concise code is a lot harder than it sounds. It requires experience and a good understanding of how code hangs together. The larger the system, the bigger the challenge. As a developer, there is nothing worse than having to support and troubleshoot badly written code. Sometimes, it’s us that write that code. I can attest that I have produced some code ‘gems’, and I’m sure I’ve written some awful code that’s still running on a server in a basement somewhere. I’ve worked hard, learnt from my mistakes and I hope that I’ve come a long way since those darker days. I also understand that I have a long road ahead of me, and I strive to learn and improve my coding skills every day."
He shared several clean code principles in the article about these areas of coding:
- Naming Things
- Naming Consistency
- Code Comments
- Readability
- S.O.L.I.D. Is Your Friend (Principles of Class Design)
- Size Matters
- Writing "Clever" Code
- Test Driving Development/Testing in General
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
