Adhering to the Ways of Coding
08 Feb 2018But Why?
Coding standards, why do we need them? They provide a foundation for developers to better understand each other. Of course, they aren’t necessary to learn right away when learning to code. However, I do believe that learning coding standards can help anyone that is learning to code. From my own personal experience, I feel that it’s easier to learn standards when you are new to the experience. This is mostly because since it’s your first time, you are able to adapt more to your learning.
Cleanness
From my experience with working in group projects, I find that if you work with a group of people, it’s easier if people write code that is easy to read. This can be from putting comments at long parts of code, making brackets easy to track, etc. At one point, I had to work with someone who used variable names such as “a”, “ct”, and other short or single letter variables. This made it hard for me because I would have to search through the entire code to see what they were even used for. Of course there were no comments explaining what they were. So instead of looking through the entire code, I just went to him personally and asked him cause at least that was less painful than reading through over 100 lines of code. Now if you were wondering why I didn’t bother to look through the code, it was just due to the messy nature of it. Indentation and spacing was lacking in some areas and at some point, there was a bracket error that I couldn’t even trace. And it is for this exact reason that when I write my code, I make it clean enough so that it doesn’t make my brain explode just from looking at it. It saves not only my time, but the other people that are in my group as well. Could just be one of my pet peeves but hey, do what you gotta do.
Working with Intellij and ESLint
As its been only about five exact days since I’ve installed Intellij and started using it, there are still many things that I don’t know about it to make a definite conclusion. So far, I feel like ESLint is mostly useful regarding to put const or let but I feel that this is something minor. I find that the green checkmark is both useful and a pain. It’s useful in the sense that it helps to improve my coding standards and my understanding of the language but is painful because there are just times when I have no idea why its giving me an error and I just have no idea how to fix it. Is that trivial? Honestly, I don’t know.
Just Do It
We can argue that coding standards are trivial and subjective but at the end of the day, it definitely is one of the things every software engineer should know or learn eventually. As I said earlier, it not only saves your time, but everyone else’s time. And on the note of ESLint, I didn’t even know that leaving a space between a set of parentheses and brackets were a thing. But hey…
