Code Gardening is the practice of making small improvements as you see them while you are working, even if they are not directly connected to the feature or defect you’re currently addressing.
Tidying things up as you go is never wrong - just ask any gardener or that friend of yours with the immaculate house.
Tidy esthetic code is provably easier to read, easier to understand and easier to reason about.
Most importantly, you should be gardening because code can be beautiful … and it should be.
Sunday, February 07 2016
code-gardening
Code Gardening is the practice of making small improvements as you see them while you are working, even if they are not directly connected to the feature or defect you’re currently addressing.
Sunday, February 21 2016
code-gardening
Create helper methods to capture key concepts, even if they are only one line. Giving these concepts a meaningful name helps people reason about the rest of the code.
Sunday, February 28 2016
code-gardening
Objects and methods in the standard libraries doesn’t need to be written nor debugged.
Sunday, March 20 2016
code-gardening
Names for method should say what they do, but not how they do it.
Sunday, March 27 2016
code-gardening
Use Full Words for concepts, not codes or abbreviations. This is the fifth in a series of posts on Code Gardening - the practice of making small improvements as you see them while you are working.
Sunday, April 10 2016
code-gardening
Write documentation comments on every method, every member. Well written documentation comments make it easier to understand the intent of the code that you’ve written. This will assist any developer who comes along after you - which might just be you, in six months time.
Saturday, April 16 2016
code-gardening
Validate the arguments provided to all methods. Everyone knows that good diagnostics make it easier to troubleshoot issues - validating method arguments at the start of a method gives you an opportunity to detect issues earlier, and to give better information.
Sunday, May 15 2016
code-gardening
Boolean method parameters are evil. We use boolean values all the time - they are extremely useful.
Sunday, May 22 2016
code-gardening
Having multiple Boolean method parameters is a really really evil thing to do. In last weeks post we discussed how boolean parameters are evil and what can be done to rectify the issue.
Saturday, June 11 2016
code-gardening
Throw Rich Exceptions that are thoroughly informative to allow easy fault diagnosis. System failures are inevitable. When something does go wrong, your code has one final responsibility - to leave enough diagnostic information to allow someone to work out what happened.
Saturday, June 25 2016
code-gardening
Somebody asked me the other day why I thought code gardening was so important - why had I invested my time in this series of blog posts and in a live coding presentation that I’ve given multiple times. That question turned into an interesting conversation and I thought I’d share one of those ideas with you.
Saturday, July 02 2016
code-gardening
When you have any non-trivial condition - whether in an if, while or until statement - move the condition into a well named local bool variable to aid in readability. This is another in my series of posts on Code Gardening - the practice of making small improvements as you see them while you are working.
Saturday, July 30 2016
code-gardening
Don’t write more code than is necessary to get the job done. It can be very easy to write too much code. There are a lot of reasons why this might happen; the important thing is to recognise code like this when you see it and to fix the problem on the spot.
Sunday, August 14 2016
code-gardening
Don’t pass null as an explicit argument into a method. The problem with passing null as an explicit value into a method is very similar to that of passing explicit bool values into a method - the code is fundamentally unreadable.
Sunday, September 11 2016
code-gardening
If you’re tempted to write a method with a boolean return type, consider whether another design might be more appropriate. One classic illustration of the problem with boolean return values can be seen in the standard .NET framework method int.TryParse().
Saturday, October 08 2016
code-gardening
Given some of my recent blog posts, such as “Boolean Parameters are Evil” and “Multiple Boolean Parameters are Really Evil, it might seem that I have some kind of personal vendetta against booleans.
Tuesday, November 15 2016
code-gardening
Follow method archetypes to constrain your method design to avoid surprises and simplify your design. This is another in my series of posts on Code Gardening - the practice of making small improvements as you see them while you are working.
| Semantic Types in C#6 27 May 2016 |