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Simple code

I've been writing a series of blog posts trying to summarize what are the key incredients of good code. The working title for the series was called "my view of clean code" but clean code is already a existing term (and a book, read it if you haven't). My view is mostly same, a bit different and with a idea that these are not rules or laws but conventions, ideas and practices that can be applied in many situations but this is not a silver bullet.

I'll be publishing ten posts in addition to this one on various subjects that relate to code, code bases, interactions in code or interactions between systems and how to build all this with the aspire to make everything simple so that the code is as easy to test, reason and as understandable as possible.

Each post will be a short and simple description of the subject with possibly some example code.

A new post will be published every other week. In the first part I'll be writing about functions and methods and that will be online tomorrow May 23 2021.

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Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...

Simple code extra: Readability examples

Seven ways to write the same code snippet  Here are eight ways to write the exactly same code. Some are easier to read than others and all are a variation of a code I've seen in a real code base. My personal favorite is #7, what's yours?  #1 One liner DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company }.toSet() #2 two lines, three operations DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }   .map { it.company }.toSet() #3 Evaluation on it's own line DAO.filter {   it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company }.toSet() #4 Each operation and evaluation on their own lines DAO.filter {   it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company } .toSet() #5 All function calls and evaluation on their own lines DAO   .filter {     it.name == "foo"   }.map { it.company }   .toSet() #6 Everything on it's own line DAO   .filter {     it.name == "foo"   }   .map { it.company }   .toSet() #7 All function calls on their own lines DAO   .filter {  i...

Simple code: Version control commits

Currently the most popular version control system is git and I'll be writing this based on git and it's functionalities and capabilities. Git is often seen as a way to enable distributed programming i.e. multiple programmers can work on the same code repository quite easily without disturbing each others work (much). In addition to that just like other VCS's it's also a log of work but to my experience that part is often unfortunately neglected. What I will be focusing this time is the log part because I think it deserves more attention. Why to create a meaningful log? The git log should consist from small meaningful changesets where each commit addresses a single problem. By dividing the log to small commits it enables resilient way of working. Being resilient enables simple and fast procedures to rollbacks, reviews, tags, branching etc. Lets say that a developer is implementing a REST API. The API needs a web layer that receives the HTTP requests, it probably has some...