It’s January of the new year which means it’s the beginning of the second term of my senior capstone experience. Since my capstone is first and foremost a research project, I spent the first term conducting a vast amount of information, analyzing previous studies for relevant insight, and familiarizing myself with the nature of artificial intelligence in the context of election prediction. This meant there was actually very little in the way of concrete programming work to be done. However, the beginning of this second term marks the beginning of actual development as the first lines of code have finally been written. As such, there’s no better time for another installment of Some Bugs Allowed.
In this edition, I’ll discuss one bad coding practice I would like to abandon going forwards, and one good coding habit that I would like to adopt as the team and I begin working on the programming portion of our project.
After digging through a fair few blogs, articles, and essays online regarding clean code and avoiding code smells, I can honestly say that I’m fairly consistent and adhere to most of the guidelines I found already. However, there are certainly a few bad habits I could benefit from dropping. One particular article dealt with identifying code smells and I found it to be particularly helpful in identifying a few of these habits. Many of these involved smarter design when it comes to large programs consisting of multiple classes. I found the article’s section on Preventers to be the most insightful in this regard, and found the discussion on Factory Design Pattern to offer the most clear and logical approach for avoiding many of the pitfalls mentioned in this section. I believe it will be key during the development of a large-scale project such as this capstone to avoid time-consuming code smells and implement smart design strategies from the get-go.
On the other hand, the practice that I would most like to adopt and utilize more often is definitely version control and git utilization in general. Outside of class assignments where it has been a necessity, I have only sporadically made use of GitHub, especially to the full potential of the platform. As development picks up on this capstone project, I really want to push myself and my team members to make the most of git and to really nail the fundamentals of using GitHub in a team setting. This will not only provide us with version control, but it will reinforce high-quality work via peer-reviews, allow us to use a centralized repository where we can easily access necessary files, and give quality experience using one of the industry’s most abundant tools.
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