This week for our blog we are reading an article on clean code and an article on code-smells. I decided to read Mikel Ors’ “Clean Code – A Practical Approach”, and Christiaan Verwijs’ “In-Depth: What Scientific Research Has To Say About Technical Debt And Code Smells”.
One thing that I would like to start practicing more frequently is clean naming. Meaningful and descriptive names are foundational to writing code that’s easy to read, understand, and maintain. [1] A well-named variable or function communicates its purpose without needing extra explanation. This saves time for anyone reviewing the code at a later time, including myself. (Let’s be honest, I’m going to forget the specifics of what I’ve coded six months from I originally coded it.) By choosing expressive names, my code becomes more clear, reducing the time it takes to interpret what the goal of the code is.
Conversely, I would like to avoid the use of spaghetti code. Spaghetti code refers to a long, messy block of code that lacks proper structure or clear logic, making it difficult to debug or interpret. [2] There are numerous contributing factors to this: rushed decisions, lack of foresight, pressure from management, ignoring the principles of modularity. To avoid this, using helper and support functions instead of repeating code or forcing one function to perform numerous different actions goes a long way. This also makes code more easily reusable.
The development team for Furever Matchup is dedicated to utilizing clean naming practices and avoiding spaghetti code as much as possible. This will contribute to more easily understandable code and better collaboration, which will reduce technical debt and contribute to a lesser number of bugs along the way.
Resources
[1] Ors, M. (2024, January 29). Clean code - A practical approach. Medium. https://medium.com/clarityai-engineering/clean-code-a-practical-approach-896546435235
[2] Verwijs, C. (2022, August 29). In-depth: What scientific research has to say about technical debt and code smells. Medium. https://medium.com/the-liberators/on-technical-debt-and-code-smells-ae8de66f0f8b