Writing Clean Code

In many of the previous classes that I have taken throughout my college process, I have been tasked with writing code. However, in nearly all of the assignments I have received so far, instructions only require the code to be working or at most want there to be comments to go along with said code. After reflecting on this fact, I began to think more about how there must be some sort of standards for writing code; some sort of quality control when it came to preparing code for use in a professional environment. This is where the practices of writing “clean code” come in.

Recently, I have read a blog post called: “Writing clean code: best practices and tips for developers” by René Cadenas, in which the author went on to outline several key points to follow when improving the readability and cleanliness of code. I chose to read this article in order to develop a better understanding of the topic covered in class, as well as to create a better understanding of how I can implement the use of clean code practices in future workspaces.  “Clean code” is defined here as “code that is not only functional but also easy to read, understand, and maintain”. The author also wrote about why clean code matters, claiming that it leads to improved collaboration between developers, and that implementing defining features of clean code, like meaningful naming conventions, proper documentation, and reusable code blocks that don’t require other developers to repeat efforts and redundancy, will all lead to a final product that follows the principles of writing “clean code”. Other topics of emphasis in the blog post were: consistency of code, clarity of comments, and efficiency of the code written.

After having read this blog, and through our classes in which we had our own lessons of writing clean code, I now understand why it is such an important aspect of writing code. After reading the article, I learned about how much of a difference refactoring code can actually make when it comes to the readability of code, which I didn’t consider throughout our in class discussions. After seeing examples of refactored code alongside the same code in its non-refactored form, it really convinced me to try harder to implement these practices in my own writing of code. Moving forward from this point, I want to put a lot more thought into how I write my code and whether other people are clearly able to understand it in the same way that I view it. After all that I’ve seen on the topic, I think the best way to go about this is through practicing more on implementing these “clean code” practices in my own work. I think it might even be a good idea to use a separate “clean code” guide to double check code I write in the future before submitting it. 

Blog Referenced: https://blog.elaniin.com/writing-clean-code-tips-for-developers/