Readability is a corner stone of good coding practice. Making things easy to read in any area is of importance and of value. The standard of what easy to read is somewhat dependent on the circumstances, but when allowing people to look at something and quickly understand exactly what it is saying is a pretty easy to read way of putting it.
Easy to read applies to so many areas in the field of computer science not just code, but comments, documentation are some of the primary areas. But what about project management, communication, and simple organization? The value of easy to read is that you can look at something and know what you need to know with out spending a significant amount of time just trying to understand the way it is written let alone the content.
Easy to read code is one thing and something I strive to do as I have been train for a long time, but when creating our team’s Trello board I found that I had to create a new definition of easy to read or maybe better said a new way of applying easy to read. Within the Trello board by simply adding a few bits of information to the titles of our cards. The amount of information that can be packed onto a single card is impressive but again it is a balancing act. This created an already easy to read board just a little bit easier so that way people did not have to dig into the card for relevant quick information.
All of this may be elementary but I found it to be a challenging thing and helped me to again see how CS basics apply to so much more than just Computer science. In communication making the main point easy to find and understand makes sure that people who only read a line or two have the opportunity to get the general message. Making information that you have to look at everyday or not easy to read will allow us to spend less time trying to find what we need and more time getting work done.
The KISS principle applies here keep it simple stupid and can help us to create easy to read information that will benefit not only other but also ourselves in the short and long run.
