Practices To Make Code Better

Bad habits are hard to break and even harder if you don’t realize that what you’re doing is undermining your work. If you know but don’t care—that would be the worst. When it comes to programming there are a lot of developers and programmers who encounter a lot of issues throughout their entire programming career. Some of the developers are very hard working but when it comes to their progress, they lack somewhere and could not achieve what they actually expect as a programmer.  

Programming is basically an art. A lot of you may strongly disagree with this. But programming is not just about, programmers start writing logics with a blank notepad and getting the desired output, it is a lot more than that. It takes skill to write a good program. There are various aspects that lead to a ‘highly productive’ program. For example, how much time did you take to write it? Or is your program easy to read? 

Let’s discuss distinctive tactics that dexterous programmers use to write smarter programs.

• Practice To Follow DRY Principle

In The Pragmatic Programmer, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is defined as:-

“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”

Everybody knows that dry stuff is lighter and easier to maintain, manipulate and store. When it comes to programming DRY practices can be taken the same way. Imagine You have programmed an app that feeds the fish once an hour throughout the day. Instead of writing the code for locating the food, picking the food and then feeding the fish 24 times, you write the code at once giving it name as feed.flakes. Then all you need to do is type feed.flakes each time. If your app needs to throw shrimps instead of flakes, you just need to change the code once, rather than 24 times.Adding additional, unnecessary code to a codebase increases the amount of work required to extend and maintain the software in the future.  Duplicate code adds to technical debt. Duplication in the process is also waste if it can be automated. 

• Refactor

The term ‘Refactoring’ is mainly used to indicate required code cleanup/redesign. The purpose of code refactoring is to make the code more efficient and maintainable. Code refactoring is important if you want to avoid the dreaded code rot. Code rot results from duplicate code, myriad patches, bad classifications, and other programming discrepancies. Below are a few practices that are helpful in deciding when to refactor.

Don’t Wait Too Long

A great example is when you determine that multiple components of your app are reimplementing the same functionality. Following the DRY principle, you will want to abstract this, and preferably before you’ve repeated yourself too many times.

Document Areas of Your Codebase You Want To Update

We should work to document areas of the codebase that are minor annoyances–things we don’t need to refactor today, but should take care of sometime. By keeping a list of such issues, it’s very easy to spend an hour here or there going through a few of the bullet points.

Make Sure You Have Good Test Coverage Before Refactoring

Because refactoring is all about changing the internals while preserving the same behavior, you want to be sure you didn’t accidentally change the program’s behavior. If you have good testing around the code you will be changing, you can make changes without fear of such mistakes. Because of this, it’s a good plan to review the tests in place, and add to them if there are any gaps. Integration and system tests are often very valuable here.

• Drop The Pretentious Laser and Just Focus

If you want to achieve insane business growth, you need to focus on setting and achieving the right goals for your company. Through creating an appropriate plan that brings you closer and closer to the expectations you’ve set for your business, you can carve out a path to success that doesn’t seem insurmountable.

Why It’s Important to Refine Your Business Goals

Establishing goals can help any person to start out on the path to becoming successful. However, setting vague goals will do very little to help your company grow. If you don’t clearly define what you’d like to achieve, you’ll never know if you’re getting closer to making that goal a reality.

For example, if your goal is simply that you’d like to ‘grow in your career,’ you’ll struggle to know whether or not that objective has been reached successfully. Without setting parameters, deadlines, and expectations, you don’t know what level of growth is enough to say your goal has been achieved. On the other hand, you can set specific targets for your business growth, such as a desired yearly income or amount of sales.

• No Fear of commitment

Every developer knows the good practice of performing small commits. However, the practice is not only about commits. The whole development process can greatly benefit from it. As a result, each small commit should go through it separately. Probably the biggest reason to keep changes small is to make it easier to track down which change caused a particular bug. If two changes are commingled into a single commit, you may have to manually disentangle them to figure out which one was responsible. Large changes also make it complex to go back and dig through history.

Advantages of Small Commits and Continuous Improvement

1. Revert a commit with ease if something goes wrong. Big commits are harder to revert since you may not want to revert all of the changes but only a subset.
2. Small commits are easier to understand when reviewing a pull request.
3. Write better commit messages. Since small commits are usually more focused and less broad than big commits, it is often easier to state the purpose of a small commit.
4. Improve your statistics

• Consistency In Actions

Consistency forms habits and creates progress towards goals no matter how small.

In programming, consistency is king to maintainability. Inconsistent code prevents your peers from creating appropriate mental models required to support and extend a codebase.

Refactoring can be done very easily on consistent codebases, but refactoring inconsistency leads to defects and faulty products. This includes consistency in our file system structure, function layout, hierarchy of objects, functions and components, documentation, and environments.

To keep consistency in your codebases, document patterns and where they are used in a shared knowledge repository and when you or your team has discovered a pattern that outperforms the old one, create a refactoring plan and document it.

• Never Be Afraid To try New Things

One of the reasons why IT is still one of the most profitable industries in the world is that it’s constantly changing and evolving. New trends appear every day, along with new technologies and marketing strategies. Anyone who wants to be in this business needs to constantly keep track of everything and be ready to learn on the fly.

Of course, you might think to yourself, “But I’m a programmer. Why do I need to learn anything beyond my job?” Well, the answer is simple. Nowadays, you have to be as versatile as possible if you want to move ahead in your career. Even if you don’t want to advance, you still need to constantly learn new skills  and improve yourself so that you won’t become outdated and get left behind.