“They taught you how to program. Then they taught you how to develop. But first they should have taught you how to code.”
One of the major challenges in any modern development environment is “code rot”. Your codebase starts out well-designed, well-structured, and well-implemented, but in six months it’s a writhing miasma of inconsistent, incoherent, incomprehensible line-noise.
The problem isn’t inherent to the particular programming language you’re using, nor was it caused by the inherent structure of your software. The problem is that, while every developer is taught how to design good programs, and how to implement good solutions, very few are ever taught how to actually write good code. It’s as though book authors were shown how to plot stories and arrange chapters, but never shown how to construct an actual sentence, or even how to spell correctly.
This full day course addresses that omission, by focusing on practical guidelines and techniques for writing code (in any modern language) that is maintainable, robust, and efficient.
The class covers:
- Code as communication
- Code as documentation
- Code as affordance
- The psychology of reading code (vs writing code)
- Minimizing debugging by eliminating “enbugging”
- Developing reliable and consistent coding habits: how, what, and why
In particular, it offers simple and practical techniques for:
- Better code layout
- Clearer naming conventions
- Effective datatype selection
- Cleaner API design
- More robust error handling
- Usable internal and external documentation
Taking one day to step back and focus on the fundamentals of actually writing code might seem trivial or unproductive, but it can be surprisingly powerful and effective: the unexpected key to creating cleaner, more robust, and more maintainable codebases.
Half-day or 1-day seminar
Developers at all skill levels who work as part of a team or who simply wish to write better, more reliable, more maintainable code.