I love efficient code. There is an odd type of satisfaction to writing well-performing code. Faster! Shorter! Less memory-consuming! More power! MORE! Well, it’s easy to see how quickly this gets out of hand. Before you know it, your code is a hot mess of high-performing, totally unmaintainable blocks. What started as a beauty endsContinue reading “Don’t Talk Just KISS”
Tag Archives: Clean Code
A Debt That Can Never Be Repaid
I’ve been writing code for over twenty years. In twenty years, I’ve learned there’s never enough time to write all the code I want to write. Developers have been struggling with the constraints of time since the first lines of code were punched into cards. There is never enough time to add all the codeContinue reading “A Debt That Can Never Be Repaid”
Keep Your Comments To Yourself
I’ve been writing code for well over 30 years now. In 30 years of coding, I learned my code has to make sense to me long after I’ve written it. Later on, I started working on code shared with others. My code had to make sense to them, too. When code got really complicated, IContinue reading “Keep Your Comments To Yourself”
Beauty And The Beast
I was recently interviewed for a new contract. One of the questions I was asked was this: which would I say was more important: beautiful code or a good, polished UX. I found it to be a very important question. Paraphrasing, this was my answer: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We shouldContinue reading “Beauty And The Beast”
What Else?
As software developers, one tool at our disposal, in almost any language, is a switch expression. It comes in many forms: switch, case, when… They are all fundamentally the same. Given a value of an enumerated type, it defines the code behavior for each such possible value. In Clean Code, Uncle Bob suggests we makeContinue reading “What Else?”
Nice and Tidy
Appearance matters. I noticed that when I let myself go and don’t bother with tidying up, it has a snowball effect. What starts as a cup left on the coffee table soon becomes a messy home. The same is true for code. If I don’t keep a high bar, soon enough the whole thing isContinue reading “Nice and Tidy”
Legacy Code
What is legacy code? I was asked this question in an interview for a contract once. I answered that all code, once written, is immediately legacy code. I got that contract. I still believe this to be the case. Any developer worth their salt never stops learning. This means yesterday’s code is inevitably not asContinue reading “Legacy Code”
Clean Your Code!
You may have heard of Uncle Bob. If you have not, now is as good a time as any. Robert C. Martin, known as Uncle Bob, is the author of quite a few canon books. The one I want to focus on in this post is Clean Code. Out of all of Uncle Bob’s booksContinue reading “Clean Your Code!”
Optimising My Life 