Hey Developer, the product you create is your code

Many of you (yes you) have the weird notion that the functionality you create is actually the product you deliver to your stakeholder, and that is where you are wrong! Sure the needed functionality and behavior is the reason why you are programming, al do some developers don’t need a reason to code, we call this behavior YAGNI.

So if the functionality and behavior is not the product you deliver, than what is it?

It is your CODE.

And you know what? I need to be able to give your code to any other developer and they should be able to just pick it up and start changing and extending it. This means that by definition it is important that your code is readable and understandable; and no this does not mean readable and understandable to you.

Readable and understandable eh? So I’ll just add comments to the code to explain my intent, that should do it. Wrong again, if you feel the need to add comments to your code to explain what is going on then that is an obvious sign that there is something wrong with the way you wrote it. Make your code explain it self, that way it won’t be out of date when you change it.

Descriptive naming

The first step to make your code readable and understandable is to use descriptive names for all your classes, methods, properties and variables. Don’t shorten your names, make them complete. Yes this means that you will have to type a little bit more, intellisense will be a great help here. This also means that you have to actually think about what it is that this “thing” is representing, which in turn improves your design as well.

Keep it small

Keep your classes and methods small, something small is more easily to understand than something big. A good principle to help you achieve this is the Single Responsibility Principle which dictates that a class or method should only have one responsibility. When something has multiple responsibilities then you should split it up in multiple methods or classes. When correctly applied (with a little help of the Dependency Inversion Principle) this will also help you de-couple your code from each other.

Formatting

Try to format your code as good as possible, don’t put to much on a single line, make your indentation correct, don’t suddenly add many empty lines in your code. Formatting will do a lot to display the flow of your code, use it correctly.

Weird logic

When you have some weird logic like some if else statements and for loops which don’t tell you it’s intend very well, try if you can split these things up into multiple private methods purely to explain in the code why you are doing something. Use the method names to make sense of the weird logic.

In the end this is what separates you from the other mediocre developers, this is something that is more important then knowing the latest new technologies (al do some of these latest new technologies may actually help you make the code more readable and understandable). Good developers write code that functions and behaves correctly, great developers make sure that their code is also easy to be understood by other developers.

Tip: Read clean code from Robert C. Martin
Uncle bob has dedicated a whole book full with tips and tricks (ok tips and tricks sounds demeaning, but really it is a great book that every developer should read).