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What Workplace Coding Practices Do You Use?
Agent_9191 asks: "Recently I've been promoted to what essentially amounts to a project lead role for every project we do, in house. Since my company has run for the past 35+ years with no form of central IT department, there has been no standards put into place for developers to abide by. One of my tasks is to set up standards in how projects will be implemented and produced. Right now I'm more concerned about trying to set up coding standards, so that any developer can jump into any part of a project and be able to figure out what's going on, without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code. I've come across some documents in this area from a few sources (of course can't remember them off the top of my head). What practices/standards do you use in your workplace?"
Yeah, but Joel's an ass. Have any of his worshippers here on /. actually *used* something written by Fog Creek or whatever? FogBUGZ, a web-based bugtracker, seems to be his one claim to fame, & it's terribly mediocre. I mean, mostly it works, but the search function doesn't, the UI is inconsistent, & while you can define filters (such as, "my open priority-1 bugs"), you can't share them, which makes them nearly useless. Joel writes a good spiel, but when it comes to coding, his company ain't the shit.
Plus, he argues passionately for paying programmers well & giving them exciting projects, but in at least two cases he hired interns to start his company's most interesting apps.
Dude needs to work on his street cred.
The best advice I ever got was to write "why", not "what" a piece of code does.
See? Completely useless. Let's try again:
Ah, much better! Any Computer Science peon knows that "counter++" increments counter. What they might not know is why. Those simple bits of "why" comments can make reading code so much easier.
Organizational comments (those that delineate what chunks of code inside of a method do) can be helpful, too. (Ex: "// Normalize string", "Encode string", "Send String") They make narrowing in on a particular "task" performed in a method even easier.
Other than that, however, the biggest and most persistent and most annoying problem I have is poorly-engineered code. Some people just do not know how to apply their college degrees. I wish CS degrees had a bigger emphasis in software engineering. Would you hire an architect who couldn't design anything bigger than a porta-potty? Why does the CS industry get away with doing the same thing?