{"id":22,"date":"2025-01-17T00:01:14","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T00:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/?p=22"},"modified":"2025-01-17T00:01:14","modified_gmt":"2025-01-17T00:01:14","slug":"clean-code-clean-workflow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/2025\/01\/17\/clean-code-clean-workflow\/","title":{"rendered":"Clean Code, Clean Workflow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After reading through the first chapter of Robert Martin’s book, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship, I came away with a few key takeaways that I would like to highlight which may prove useful to programmers, particularly those who strive to write code that is not only functional, but also maintainable<\/strong> and scalable<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Code degradation – A personal shortcoming<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

One area I seek to improve on as I continue in my programming journey is what Martin calls “The Boy Scout Rule”. The Boy Scouts have a rule to “leave the campground cleaner than you found it”, and Martin applies this same rule to writing code. He argues that code needs to be kept clean over time and it is a common problem to see code begin to degrade overtime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past courses here at OSU I have had a couple of occasions where I had projects that lasted around the whole term, and I started off great, adhering to all the principles of code cleanliness that I knew of at the time. However, as the term progressed and deadlines loomed, my code began to get sloppier as I was resorting to quick fixes while ignoring the root causes of issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My biggest problem area is the length of my functions. I will often continuous add to a single function rather than break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. I found a small example of this in my coding project from my Software Engineering I class, here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is a brief snippet of a damage calculator I was making for a video game I play. In an attempt to not clog this post with code, I omitted two other equip functions, armor and ring, which both had the same forms of error messages. Looking back, I could have made my code much cleaner by creating an equip_item function which was passed information via the equip_weapon, ability, etc. functions, which would save a lot of unnecessary repetition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving Forward<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on my past code, and after reading about Martin’s Boy Scout Rule, I felt a “click” as I realized some of the shortcomings of my previous programming experiences. The idea of working to leave the code base cleaner than I found it makes a lot sense, and gives a visible goal to look towards as I am working on my code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Martin, Robert C. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. 1st edition, Pearson, 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After reading through the first chapter of Robert Martin’s book, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship, I came away with a few key takeaways that I would like to highlight which may prove useful to programmers, particularly those who strive to write code that is not only functional, but also maintainable and scalable. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14543,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14543"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/eades\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}