Quality code is something we all strive to achieve as developers. As our knowledge of languages and frameworks grows, we begin to consider more than just the functionality of the code, but how we can improve the sophistication of it. In this post, I’ll be describing some good and bad code practices, and what I as a developer would like to improve on in order to achieve quality code.
Mark Mfonido, a software developer and blogger at DEV, defines clean code as “code that is easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to modify.” Maintaining clean code is often used to avoid redundancy and confusion from the code, but it’s also used to ease the process of working on a project with multiple people. By establishing a set of rules and conventions to maintain a clean codebase, you can ensure your code doesn’t cause issues for the other developers in terms of comprehension and compatibility with others’ code.
Clean code is important for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s important for readability. If your code is clean and readable, it will be much easier for you or other developers to understand it quickly, which, in return, will lead to improvements in development and debugging time. Next, it’s important for maintainability because projects are oftentimes growing over time, it’s important to design your code in a way that’s easy to refactor and improve upon later. Lastly, I think clean code is important for decreasing the number of bugs within an application. If you design code in a way that’s not understandable to future you or other developers, you might unintentionally introduce a new bug into your system as a result of lack of understanding.
There were a few things in the article I read that I would like to improve on myself in my coding. First, I would like to practice writing more documentation for code I write. I’ve ran into a number of different issues resulting from a lack of good documentation, so I think it’s only fair as a developer that I develop a good habit of writing the purpose and usage of my code on a regular basis. Additionally, I would like to improve my error handling in my code. Adding graceful ways to manage errors can help me to debug issues as well as prevent unexpected crashes in the system.
Now onto the bad practices to avoid when trying to maintain clean code. Some bad practices, accordig to Paul Rubens from CIO, include bad formatting or indentation, poor modularization, and failing to think ahead into the future.
I think that I personally struggle with modularization and would love to improve how I organize my code to help further a project. Another issue that Rubens points out that I struggle with is using good encryption. With a cybersecurity focus for my degree, I am getting better at understanding important security practices, but I still struggle with ensuring I use those in my code. This will make sure that my users’ data as well as my own is protected from attackers.
Thanks for reading! I hope you were able to learn a little more about good and bad coding practices and how to maintain clean code in a project.
Sources:
https://dev.to/favourmark05/writing-clean-code-best-practices-and-principles-3amh
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