Clean Code

As I start out my journey as a developer, I am always looking for ways to improve my craft. Clean Code by Robert C. Martin is a book that was recommended by many for junior developers.

Uncle Bob covered several concepts relating to OOP, design patterns, and code standards for naming, commenting, and testing. Concepts like DRY and SRP were often repeated throughout the book and used Java code to demonstrate them. Certain concepts were Java specific and I briefly browsed through them since I am not working on Java projects but they were still interesting.

The book is a good read to start off this journey with, and it reminded me of the mistakes I made when I was learning to code. I honestly would cringe if I still have access to the files that I wrote for my first year at NUS.

As best practices and approaches towards maintaining code bases come and go, we should strive to Try and leave this world a little better than you found it. The code that we write should be clean and easy to read, for others and especially our future selves to understand and maintain. It is not just about writing code that works, but also well designed and easy to understand.

It will take me time to develop better code sense and intuition as I learn to become a better developer. The points brought up in "Smells and Heuristics" outlined many points that I often find myself not doing. Let's see if I can learn and work on it. We now have many tools to help us with this, such as linters like RuboCop and ESLint.

Overall it was a good read. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning to improve their coding style. The most of the concepts discussed are language agnostic and I foresee it being applicable even years from now.