COdE fr3@K

Before we dive into the topic of this post, I would like to share with you the best possible advise I could ever give – never do everything by the book.

I know it sounds kinda odd and may appear to be irresponsible. After all, this series is about what to avoid and promote best practice. Am I not asking you do what I tell you? No, I am not.

I am asking you to think and to reason consciously why you chose to code something the way you did.

In the first post of this series, I wrote about how returning early improves code readability. It may appear so in the code snip presented in the post. It may seem to be appropriate in scenarios off the top of your head. However, I am most certain that there are contexts where returning early actually does the opposite – hurting code readability.

It is important that we understand a best practice is anything but the law. When circumstances change, it may not stand.

I ask you to think as you code.

Now, back to the topic. In this post, we will revisit a well known best practice from a less discussed perspective. View full article »

It has been a while since I last wrote. It is not that I wrote enough, I still love it, and am keen to share my (possibly biased) thoughts with fellow developers out there. But life and work have kept me busy in the past few months, busier than I would like to be.

Anyhow, I am starting a series of posts called “Root of All Evil”. The plan is to write about bad practices I see at work, on the Internet, and smelly code I used to write. I hope to be able to cover the following aspects:

• What does bad code look like
• Why is it bad
• And how it could be improved/refactored

If you happen to care reading my blog, chances are you won’t be contributing too many of those. However, even if they were someone else’s responsibility, it is essential that you I encourage you to step up, and talk him/her into making necessary changes and quitting the habit, perhaps over a cup of coffee or via a formal code review.

Though it is unlikely that I would have the luxury and the time to write weekly as I used to, I will just do my best. This series will be written casually, in Chinese or in English, yes, depending on my mood. So, bear with me and here it goes. View full article »