Green Checkmarks
20 Sep 2023
The Tool Belt
Every engineer has a tool belt. They learn different languages, frameworks, methodologies, workflows and other tools to solve problems. What people don’t realize is that adhering to coding standards is nearly just as important as learning a language. In an individual project, a neglect of coding standards might have no effect at all. When it comes to working in a team and in industry, it can make all the difference. The first thing that comes to mind is readability and maintainability. Having consistent coding standards allow developers on a team to easily read and comprehend code when sharing it with one another. By doing so, it allows developers to collaborate more effectively since it’s easier to review code, identify issues, and provide feedback. Adhering to coding standards typically improves the code quality and allows for better scalability and turnover. This means that any new team member or employee can easily get up to speed because they’d know what to expect in terms of styles and conventions.
My Experience
I learned about specific coding standards in my previous coursework but I didn’t realize how important it actually is. I first started learning concepts such as camelCase and have naturally applied it to my code ever since. I learned that there are other naming conventions for variables and it really depends on preference or the conventions set in place. During my first working experience, I learned how specific commenting styles and notations allow my boss and fellow developers to quickly review my code. Following the team’s coding standards allowed pull requests and code reviews to be made faster. My boss heavily emphasized this and showed me files from years prior which followed no coding standards. Let me just say, those files were extremely hard to read and understand.
Green Checkmarks
ESLint grants us access to the green checkmark. It’s kind of annoying but overall very helpful. Sometimes, it’d just be as simple as not having spaces surrounding a plus sign in string concatenation. It’s kind of tedious going through each of the small errors one by one but it has also indirectly saved me a lot of time in the case that I do miss a closing parenthesis or semicolon. After going through all the errors and cleaning up my code, that green checkmark is always a pleasant sight to see.
Commencement
Steve Jobs delivered a commencement speech at the Stanford Graduation. One of his stories included how he took a calligraphy class where he learned about San Serif and elegant typography. If he had never taken that class, we wouldn’t have the beautiful computer interfaces that we have today. On a smaller scale, learning about coding standards is kind of equivalent to Steve Jobs learning about San Serif. Learning this somewhat clean and elegant behavior has potential for positive impacts in the future. Moving forward, I hope to incorporate quality coding standards into all the code I write.