Detailed Notes
Season after season, the “Building Better Developers” podcast inspires tech enthusiasts to refine their craft by fostering productive habits. In a recent episode, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche emphasized coding standards—a crucial but often overlooked pillar in software development. Here’s a deep dive into their insights on how personal and team-wide coding standards can elevate your development game.
*Read More*... https://develpreneur.com/how-to-build-better-habits-with-coding-standards/
*Episode Challenge:* Refining Your Coding Standards
The hosts concluded with a weekly challenge: dedicate 5–10 minutes daily to reviewing and refining your code according to your standards. This practice serves as a litmus test to assess whether you’re following your own rules. For teams without established standards, they recommended adopting widely respected guidelines, like Google’s or PEP 8 for Python, as a starting point.
Bonus tips included leveraging documentation exports and linter configurations to share consistent settings across teams. By doing so, developers can create an environment where everyone writes code that feels cohesive and professional.
We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, there’s always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let’s continue exploring the exciting world of software development.
*Additional Resources*
* Coding Standards – A Personal Approach (https://develpreneur.com/coding-standards-a-personal-approach/) * Look More Professional With Personal Coding Standards (https://develpreneur.com/look-more-professional-with-personal-coding-standards/) * Coding Standards: Understanding Their Importance in Software Development (https://develpreneur.com/coding-standards-understanding-their-importance-in-software-development/) * Updating Developer Tools: Keeping Your Tools Sharp and Efficient (https://develpreneur.com/updating-developer-tools-keeping-your-tools-sharp-and-efficient/)
*Follow-us on:*
* https://develpreneur.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZOuFN_LhczvGyT2KSItH_g/featured * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://twitter.com/develpreneur * http://linkedin.com/develpreneur
Transcript Text
[Music] hey and we're back uh next up episode we are here we hit record something like that uh we're going to do so let's do coding standards yeah because we did leading so now we're going to do some coding standards Stuff how to do your personal coding standards and then uh maybe how to like transition that to a team and and things of that note so this one uh we'll see how it goes as always we'll see how this uh this shakes out as we we step into to it so any comments before we we hit the record for the audio side so are we thinking uh just overall coding standards like personal coding standards business coding standards or just in general yeah all of the above okay however we want to go about it we'll see where it goes I I don't want to like you know constrain us at all so if we want to ramble all over the place we can ramble all over the place well we're going to go this way we're going to count down instead of count up I guess we could do that and I just keep on counting for while with three two well hello and welcome back we are continuing our season where we are building better habits we are building better developers we are Rob and Mike he doesn't count right now I do my name is Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders of developing nor and I'm also a founder of RB Consulting where we help you Wrangle technology because let's face it it's not it's even wor it's like it's not just hurting cats a lot of times it's hurting FAL big clawed with steel spikes on their back cats I because like technology can get out of hand very quickly it can be very painful there's a lot of issues that come with sprawl and some of those are the kinds of things that only hit you at the end of the year because they hit you in the pocketbook because you've got wasted technology or shelfware that you spent all this money on you've never been able to figure out how to really leverage it that's what we do at RB Consulting is we help you make the most of your technology Investments through integration simplification automation we help you with your teams we help you with your people we find the ways to help you do a better job leveraging that technology and navigating the crazy world that technology can sometimes be and like for example in these days you got Ai and all this kind of stuff popping up everywhere it is a challenge to figure out what does that matter to me and if it does how do I make that work that's kind of stuff we work with you on now the rest of the people that are out there we work with you right now working on your habits so I want to talk about that a little bit is the The Habit pieces that have been uh that I've sort of make my experiences with them now the first one is I'm going to hit it again as the pomodora one just like keep on it that I've I've beaten on that I think often enough automation is another one that I've spent some some good time on The Branding stuff is something again that it's like this is something that had sort of like floated out of off my radar and it's very easy to do it you get really busy and if you don't have something like just sort of like a daily checkin or at least a weekly check-in with your personal brand and how do you set this up and it's such simple stuff it can be things like just look if you have a website look at your website and just like read through it you may want to do a little word smithing or you know maybe there's a color off or maybe there's something broken with your your like the things that you do on a regular basis like maybe your weekly status reports maybe you want to clean that up a little bit this is sort of a combination maybe of Automation and and branding and professionalism but those are all there a Blog doing a weekly blog or a daily blog where you're just you know maybe it's a weekly blog but you spend five minutes a day building up that Weekly blog that kind of stuff really does add up and it is real easy for it to just sort of Fade Into the background because it's not something that we think about I think often enough until we're like I need a new job I got laid off or I need to create a new product idea or something like that that's when we suddenly go into that mode if we can keep it on a regular basis it will help us out a lot good thing bad thing good thing is we're getting to the end of the year this is a I always love the getting towards end of the year because it's all about like looking back and actually spending a couple of minutes looking at what I got done during the year and a lot of times it's it's shockingly good it's like wow I I forgot that I was doing that back in January or February or March or whatever it is and like wow look how far I've come with this stuff the bad news is it's about the end of the year so I've got a couple of things I really want to get done and a lot of my yearin planning is now ahead of me and I've got a lot of wide openen things that I've got to figure out like how do I really want to do this so you it's the good part of planning but it's also the bad part of planning or my good and bad final good thing is that hey I'm sitting here doing the podcast with my buddy Mike and now he gets to talk well I have a sip of tea hey everyone my name is Michael malash I'm the co- founders of developer Nur I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we work with companies that have are struggling with their software either they have built their own custom software or they're using pre-built tools that they've bought online or just through the stores and it's not really working for them we work with you through software assessments we will help customize a solution that meets your needs and helps you improve productivity throughout your business getting to our kind of goals or challenges I've been doing really well the Pomodoro Technique uh I've spent a lot of time this week kind of looking at personal branding uh updating my resumés updating my sites like you mentioned uh also been working on my meeting prep time and trying to make sure I stay on task one of the biggest challenges I've had with our challenges is taking breaks I kind of got a lot going on it's the end of the year and I very easily am finding myself even with the Pomodoro I'm going 25 then I'm immedately going to another 2 I'm not really taking the breaks in between like I should be so I need to work on that a little bit more however with that I've actually found uh again my kitchen sink gaps kind of been cranking along pretty good uh automation ticking that off uh I have an update to a project I've been working on where I'm actually going to automate uh some new low so I don't have to do it manually anymore that will save me time less headaches also it makes the solution a little more self- sustained and can kind of sit on its own the other thing I've been struggling with so this is going to be kind of my bad is criticism um kind of giving and receiving criticism I've been in a couple meetings working a couple projects and when things are going good things are positive you're happy you know you're excited but when you kind of kick off a project or you're kind of getting into the weeds of a project and working with new teams or even old teams you can kind of Bute heads a little bit on designs and ideas and sometimes what's meant to be you know just an idea or a suggestion it can be taken critically or just kind of taken out of context so been struggling with that a little bit but that is one of my goals this week is to kind of get back on track reset and now we're past the holidays kind of just take a breath work on taking breaks uh good thing I survived Thanksgiving uh daughter made a wonderful meal um ate way too much but hey that's the holidays for you got to eat some good food and my daughter is a wonderful cook so that was a good thing so this episode I want to talk about we basically we we'll label this as coding standards and this is at both a personal level and and Team level and I want to focus more because of a building better develop we'll start with us we'll start with ourselves and that's going to be where we're going to end up spoiler alert that's going to be where we're going to end up with the the challenge at the at the end of this but I want to talk about what I want talk about encoding standards is that it really is it's not as much about matching a specific standard that's like the you know like the pep for that's out there for python or the the Oracle standards for Java or Google standards for every freaking language in the world you know and stuff like that now there is I don't want to downplay too much those things because for example like the Google standards are very important if you want to play in the Google World there is a lot of stuff that is there's a lot of that about having their standards and following their standards that will help you your site your customer site your employer site in the search engine optimization world and things like that because they want you to be you know clean or pristine or proper or whatever and how you do stuff and the more that you follow their guidelines the more as far as we can tell the better it's going to help your rating as a site how they grade your site and if you step away from that and you know let's P you know step back from the business considerations of that but in general having standards really does help you even within reading your own code there is a lot we can do now some standards get very you know specific about that if you go to like the uh uh some of the notations and some of that kind of stuff that's out there where you can look at the name of a of a function you can look at the name of a variable things like that and there's got there's all kinds of information that's hidden inside that that's encoded into the name and the standard and and how it's laid out and that can be useful but even if you don't get to that level it's like you know you don't have to go down to like Hungarian notation level to be able to get something out of your your how you name and style things so just the the the old school simplest thing is just indentation is indenting things so that you know for example if you're in a function that all the code for that function is indented now it may be nice that you've got something and a lot of the IDS that will take advantage of these things where it's like if you've got opening and closing brackets sometimes they'll I like just you know collapse that so you can just see oh yeah this is in the mix of all this other stuff you can do pretty printers and stuff like that that will try to format stuff and if your code is janky well guess what your formatting will break so it'll give you a good hint that hey I've got something out of you I've got a parentheses off or I forgot to close a quote or something like that but just the thing like like your standard so that you know I'm dealing with a class instance versus a class definition this is not like a the class itself this is actually an object instance or this is a local variable maybe versus a global variable or you know if there's something like that or a lot of times this is like for example this is a local variable to my uh my method or my function as opposed to one of the parameter variables that was passed in uh things like documentation is so like how do I comment my code so that you know where to look for your comments do I just jump to the top of a page of my file and I see everything there or or I have trouble unmuting my mic and uh sometime you know or is it something where you you look down at like the function level or something like that and getting these standards in place not only helps other people because they'll look at your code and it looks like it was written by you know somebody that knew what they were doing as opposed to particularly if you've got multiple developers they've got different standards it looks like a mess because it looks like 15 different people wrote the codes you never really know where to look things like that but it also helps ourselves if I look back and it's actually sort of funny because I have evolved some of my standards over the years they've changed and adjusted and a lot of it actually a lot of times you can see what language I'm mostly coding in because that stuff spills out into whatever other languages I'm coding in at that time and it can be challenging when I look back at stuff from 10 or 15 or 20 years ago and I'm like oh yeah that's right I always put this thing here I did that thing there and it does go to like structure and all kinds of other stuff it's you know it's things like probably all of us have evolved from HTML how we approach that as uh CSS and JavaScript to become more and more a part of that how do we and some of it's just like where do we place like our JavaScript files where do we put our script tags and some things like that it's it's all these little things that build up build into our standards and some of them yes are very much about U you most efficient way to do something but a lot of it really is just aesthetic it's just so when you look at it it looks like code that you wrote it's a little bit putting your stamp on it and as a team it's putting your team's stamp on it so there's a lot of value in getting to those standards and I'm going to pass it to Mike before we talk a little bit more about like implementing those standards and getting into that so what are your thoughts and some of your experiences in this world yeah so you've kind of touched on all the code like styling standards and that I I liked a lot of the examples I want to take it slightly a little bit further than just the coding standards so for instance like over the years I've worked lot in healthcare and financial uh organizations and it's not just coding standards we necessarily have to worry about uh sometimes our coding standards are actually impacted by industry standards like Hippa sorban oxy socks and we have to actually not just have coding standards but also make sure that our standards comply with uh you know with government and legal uh standards but within that you also if you're depending upon what your application is for so say You're Building mobile apps or you're building uh applications that are for specific devices also understanding the requirements or the standards for instance uh deploying mobile apps to the Apple App Store or Apple App Store you have to comply with their standards in order for your software to be able to be approved and uh show up on the Apple Store so is sometimes coding standards aren't internal to your company sometimes there are external factors to what standards you have to actually meet in order for your software to be uh published and actually get out to the public now flipping back a little bit back into the coding standards one of the biggest things I like to talk about is always test testing but in this particular case I want to focus on documentation so you mentioned documentation as we write our code there's always a certain level of requirements documentations uh software requirements documents test documents things of that nature when we typically write our code we think about writing comments within our code uh as developers were not always great at that but typically there's some type of documentation in the code so that you know what the code is for however I like prefer to do the clean code approach where when you write the code your standards are essentially that your code is going to be self-documenting it's going to be clean code meaning that your functions are going to be tailored to a sing single unit of work or some specific way that you write it is it's human readable and you essentially can just read the code and know exactly what that particular function or that particular class or object is supposed to do uh that way you don't have to really run around and write all these comments everywhere unless there's some complexity to it that you need to highlight for instance oh this needs to be in here to meet this particular standard or hey we implemented this to fix this bug one thing I will throw out though is if you are writing documentation or troubleshooting code if you have spent hours troubleshooting something and it is a very uh elusive bug or something that is not very well um I guess identified within the industry for instance if it's something you found and no one else has it you've gone through uh like stack Overflow you've gone through um user boards you've gone through Discord if it's something that you are having a very hard time finding if and when you do find the solution make a comment about it if you have a a link that took you hours to find but hey here's the solution two things one you could copy the link in and take a chance that it's still going to be there 6 months to a year to 10 years from now or you can copy the blur still provide the link but copy the core piece of that that hey this bug was introduced because of this kind of give you know the cause and effect here's what we found or here's what the problem was here's how we solved it and this is how we kind of went about to find it now sometimes putting that in code can be cumbersome but depending upon your documentation process if you keep it at the code chances are it will always be there when you need it if you put it in a Wiki or on paper in some physical documentation that could get lost over time so these are just some ideas within some additional ideas for your coding standards to kind of improve the process and keep your code clean self-d doent and comply with those standards so I'm going to go with the challenge this time around is what this is going to be painful to some of you maybe all of us because it does touch on one of the things I'm going to mention is the word everybody hates which is comments but your challenge for the week ahead is every day take a few minutes like you know less than 15 5 10 minutes look at some C that you're you pick a file that you're working on or a couple files or a folder something like that and review it based on whatever your standards are what you're probably going to find is you're going to find some stuff where you're like your names are not named right uh you may have comments or missing for some of your F from some of your functions uh or maybe it's you know they're out of date a little bit things like that let's really just look at it and say do I follow my own coding standards if you're like me the answer is going to be a sounding no and you're going to need to like go clean some of that stuff up now the you the funny thing is like as an example I just recently spent a lot of time in standard documents across a bunch of different languages for a couple different teams and they were pretty consistent but then when I turned around and was doing some coding there were a couple of times that I caught myself after I was like oh crap I didn't follow my own standard that I had like grabbed from Grant I guess not somebody else took it from somebody else adopted it and said let's this is what we're going to do and then needed to clean my own coat up so this is something for you is just start thinking through those standards because it is this is where it really does help us to build a habit because we have to think about the standard when we're doing it it does slow us down if it's just how we do this then it's going to make things a lot easier for us and for the team around us now as far as the team is concerned is if you don't have standards documentation then pick one you know you don't even have to spend five minutes you can go search like I used Google before if you go out and Google search or whatever your language you know your favorite search engine is go look for Google's coding standards they've got a whole page that's full of all of these different languages and what are the standards they use and how do they you know how they've got links to them and all that kind of stuff so you can pick the ones you use and just go boom we're going to adopt this and try to do that now you may also another great way to do it is pick one of these leners that are out there that we've talked about before a lot of them are built into your idees you can set some stuff up in your preferences so that it will just go look and you're not going to get errors but you will get warnings that say this does not follow your coding standard fix those just like pick a couple of those and go do them a good example I'm just going to give very specific is if you're using python they have the pep eight standards all of the IDS basically can adopt to those I did it just other day I spent 15 minutes walking through a couple of files just looking at all the little warnings I shut off the spelling errors because it doesn't think anything spelled right even if it is misspelled a lot of times it's like it's a false positive but all the other stuff I went through and then just did a general cleanup there's just it's very helpful because there's a lot of things I'm like oh yeah I should have done this differently but sometime it's also like very like there's it's very rewarding to get to the end of a file and be like this the system says it's clean says it was not only it's sort of like if you use grammarly it's like if you really misspell and have bad grammar and then you get to a point where it gives you like a 100% And it's like everything's lined up and it's exactly how it should be you get like a little you feel like you you're getting a gold star or a smiley face or something like that so that's your challenge every day this week spend a little bit of time looking at your code reviewing it and making sure that you are following your standards your team standards or something along those lines and if you don't know what they are then spend a little bit of time each day this week building out standards it's very simple it's stuff like how what is the standard for naming file names for folder structures for variable names for you how do I put where do I put my parentheses and loops and all of those sorts how do I indentation is it two spaces three spaces is it tabs is it all of that stuff just write it down and build if you don't already have it a personal set of coding standards for yourself also bonus challenge send us an email s us an email at info developer.com let us know how you're doing with the challenges what are some challenges you'd like to see in the the days and weeks ahead how you doing as you get towards the end of the year what are some things that you're looking forward to in next year what are some things that maybe you need to address before this year ends out and we move into 202 5 those are all things that would' love to hear from you guys about get some information some feedback and see where we want to go next where this can help us help you become better developers you can also hit us up at out on X at develop andur you can go to develop or Channel at YouTube uh you can go to developer.com you can lead us leave us information via the contact forms or comments uh feedback on any of the blogs and and other articles that are out there wherever you see wherever you read here seed whatever consume podcast we have stuff there so you can like leave a leave us feedback there leave us comments and and ratings and whatever you want to do to give us some feedback there we'd love to hear it that being said it's time for us to go out into our day so go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time bonus material so we kind of mentioned it through the podcast but uh you using linters uh like things like sonar Cube sonar lint are really helpful in kind of at least standardizing your look and feel of your code across uh development environments one other thing is if you're using an idees uh for instance like if you have a specific spacing or structure that you want your code to be uh make sure that you pick one uh Google has a lot of good sites but pick one that works with your IDE and then make sure everyone is using the same linter that way when you go to commit your code everyone formats correctly and you don't have that one person that formats every single line in the code and now you can't figure out what the code change was that sucks uh so make sure that everyone is on the same page early and that that way you can kind of reduce the amount of time it takes to kind of review the code and make sure you know what people are working on as a bonus bonus to that most of these IDE will also allow you to export all of those settings so you can go in you can customize your your lenting uh levels and some of the thing you know the rules and and things like that that it looks for you can export those and share those around to all your friends and yourself so ideally if you've got something where you can you're using like Visual Studio code or one of those tools that actually is a multilingual uh environment uh although most of them now are it's just you pull it into your IDE and whether you're on one machine or 18 machines you can pull it in your IDs and you just you will always have the same settings but for a team it's really nice because if somebody if the guy or gal next to you isn't using standards you can just be like hey import this and then before you save next time or before you commit just you know do the keystroke or the whatever it is to do the auto format and it saves you a lot of headaches trust me when you get into the world of like merging code one of the most frustrating things is when it's all just stupid white space kinds of stuff that really does so it looks like the files changed a lot and you've got thousands of lines of code that have changed but there's actually just one line that actually changed so those kinds of things do help a lot from a a productivity point of view one last bonus on top of that if you forget to do that all the time like I have at times and some people I know a lot of the IDS now allow you to uh format on save so every time you save your code it auto formats fore so just a little tip on that that kind of stuff is was very helpful because yes we do forget all the time it seems like we'll get in there we'll throw stuff off and then we forget to do it before we safe as always we do appreciate you guys everybody the time you've given hanging out with us uh we have more episodes to come we have holiday specials in the weeks ahead that are going to be coming and who knows how crazy and informative those may or may not be as we get into that point we wrap up this year go out there and just Embrace these last few weeks let's make sure that you're knocking some stuff out and then however far you want to get in your building better developer Journey at the end of the year that you can get there as we get into these final weeks go out there and help yourself a good one and we will talk to you next time [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
hey and we're back uh next up
episode we are here we hit record
something like
that uh we're going to do so let's do
coding
standards yeah because we did leading so
now we're going to do some coding
standards Stuff how to do your personal
coding standards and then uh maybe how
to like transition that to a team and
and things of that note so this one uh
we'll see how it goes as always we'll
see how this uh this shakes out as we we
step into to it so any comments before
we we hit the record for the audio side
so are we thinking uh just overall
coding standards like personal coding
standards business coding standards or
just in general yeah all of the above
okay however we want to go about it
we'll see where it goes I I don't want
to like you know constrain us at all so
if we want to ramble all over the place
we can ramble all over the
place well we're going to go this way
we're going to count down instead of
count up I guess we could do that and I
just keep on counting for while with
three two well hello and welcome back we
are continuing our season where we are
building better habits we are building
better developers we are Rob and Mike he
doesn't count right now I do my name is
Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders
of developing nor and I'm also a founder
of RB Consulting where we help you
Wrangle technology because let's face it
it's not it's even wor it's like it's
not just hurting cats a lot of times
it's hurting FAL big clawed with steel
spikes on their back cats I because like
technology can get out of hand very
quickly it can be very painful there's a
lot of issues that come with sprawl and
some of those are the kinds of things
that only hit you at the end of the year
because they hit you in the pocketbook
because you've got wasted technology or
shelfware that you spent all this money
on you've never been able to figure out
how to really leverage it that's what we
do at RB Consulting is we help you make
the most of your technology Investments
through integration simplification
automation we help you with your teams
we help you with your people we find the
ways to help you do a better job
leveraging that technology and
navigating the crazy world that
technology can sometimes be and like for
example in these days you got Ai and all
this kind of stuff popping up everywhere
it is a challenge to figure out what
does that matter to me and if it does
how do I make that work that's kind of
stuff we work with you
on now the rest of the people that are
out there we work with you right now
working on your habits so I want to talk
about that a little bit is the The Habit
pieces that have been uh that I've sort
of make my experiences with them now the
first one is I'm going to hit it again
as the pomodora one just like keep on it
that I've I've beaten on that I think
often enough automation is another one
that I've spent some some good time on
The Branding stuff is something again
that it's like this is something that
had sort of like floated out of off my
radar
and it's very easy to do it you get
really busy and if you don't have
something like just sort of like a daily
checkin or at least a weekly check-in
with your personal brand and how do you
set this up and
it's such simple stuff it can be things
like just look if you have a website
look at your website and just like read
through it you may want to do a little
word smithing or you know maybe there's
a color off or maybe there's something
broken with your your like the things
that you do on a regular basis like
maybe your weekly status reports maybe
you want to clean that up a little bit
this is sort of a combination maybe of
Automation and and branding and
professionalism but those are all there
a Blog doing a weekly blog or a daily
blog where you're just you know maybe
it's a weekly blog but you spend five
minutes a day building up that Weekly
blog that kind of stuff really does add
up and it is real easy for it to just
sort of Fade Into the background because
it's not something that we think about I
think often enough until we're like I
need a new job I got laid off or I need
to create a new product idea or
something like that that's when we
suddenly go into that mode if we can
keep it on a regular basis it will help
us out a lot good thing bad
thing good thing is we're getting to the
end of the year this is a I always love
the getting towards end of the year
because it's all about like looking back
and actually spending a couple of
minutes looking at what I got done
during the year and a lot of times it's
it's shockingly good it's like wow I I
forgot that I was doing that back in
January or February or March or whatever
it is and like wow look how far I've
come with this stuff the bad news is
it's about the end of the year so I've
got a couple of things I really want to
get done and a lot of my yearin planning
is now ahead of me and I've got a lot of
wide openen things that I've got to
figure out like how do I really want to
do this so you it's the good part of
planning but it's also the bad part of
planning or my good and
bad final good thing is that hey I'm
sitting here doing the podcast with my
buddy Mike and now he gets to talk well
I have a sip of tea
hey everyone my name is Michael malash
I'm the co- founders of developer Nur
I'm also the founder of Envision QA
where we work with companies that have
are struggling with their software
either they have built their own custom
software or they're using pre-built
tools that they've bought online or just
through the stores and it's not really
working for them we work with you
through software assessments we will
help customize a solution that meets
your needs and helps you improve
productivity throughout your
business getting to our kind of goals or
challenges I've been doing really well
the Pomodoro Technique uh I've spent a
lot of time this week kind of looking at
personal branding uh updating my resumés
updating my sites like you mentioned uh
also been working on my meeting prep
time and trying to make sure I stay on
task one of the biggest challenges I've
had with our challenges is taking breaks
I kind of got a lot going on it's the
end of the year and I very easily am
finding myself even with the Pomodoro
I'm going 25 then I'm immedately going
to another 2 I'm not really taking the
breaks in between like I should be so I
need to work on that a little bit
more however with that I've actually
found uh again my kitchen sink gaps kind
of been cranking along pretty good uh
automation ticking that off uh I have an
update to a project I've been working on
where I'm actually going to automate uh
some new low so I don't have to do it
manually anymore that will save me time
less headaches also it makes the
solution a little more self- sustained
and can kind of sit on its own the other
thing I've been struggling with so this
is going to be kind of my bad is
criticism
um kind of giving and receiving
criticism I've been in a couple meetings
working a couple projects and when
things are going good things are
positive you're happy you know you're
excited but when you kind of kick off a
project or you're kind of getting into
the weeds of a project and working with
new teams or even old teams you can kind
of Bute heads a little bit on designs
and ideas and sometimes what's meant to
be you know just an idea or a suggestion
it can be taken critically or just kind
of taken out of context so been
struggling with that a little bit but
that is one of my goals this week is to
kind of get back on track reset and now
we're past the holidays kind of just
take a breath work on taking breaks uh
good thing I survived Thanksgiving uh
daughter made a wonderful meal um ate
way too much but hey that's the holidays
for you got to eat some good food and my
daughter is a wonderful cook so that was
a good thing so this episode I want to
talk about we basically we we'll label
this as coding standards and this is at
both a personal level and and Team level
and I want to focus more because of a
building better develop we'll start with
us we'll start with ourselves and that's
going to be where we're going to end up
spoiler alert that's going to be where
we're going to end up with the the
challenge at the at the end of this but
I want to talk about what I want talk
about encoding standards is that it
really is it's not as much about
matching a specific standard that's like
the you know like the pep for that's out
there for python or the the Oracle
standards for Java or Google standards
for every freaking language in the world
you know and stuff like that now there
is I don't want to downplay too much
those things because for example like
the Google standards are very important
if you want to play in the Google World
there is a lot of stuff that is there's
a lot of that about having their
standards and following their standards
that will help you your site your
customer site your employer site in the
search engine optimization world and
things like that because they want you
to be you know clean or pristine or
proper or whatever and how you do stuff
and the more that you follow their
guidelines the more as far as we can
tell the better it's going to help your
rating as a site how they grade your
site and if you step away from that and
you know let's P you know step back from
the business considerations of that but
in general having standards really does
help you even within reading your own
code there is a lot we can do now some
standards get very you know specific
about that if you go to like the uh uh
some of the notations and some of that
kind of stuff that's out there where you
can look at the name of a of a function
you can look at the name of a variable
things like that and there's got there's
all kinds of information that's hidden
inside that that's encoded into the name
and the standard and and how it's laid
out and that can be useful but even if
you don't get to that level it's like
you know you don't have to go down to
like Hungarian notation level to be able
to get something out of your your how
you name and style things so just the
the the old school simplest thing is
just indentation is indenting things so
that you know for example if you're in a
function that all the code for that
function is indented now it may be nice
that you've got something and a lot of
the IDS that will take advantage of
these things where it's like if you've
got opening and closing brackets
sometimes they'll I like just you know
collapse that so you can just see oh
yeah this is in the mix of all this
other stuff you can do pretty printers
and stuff like that that will try to
format stuff and if your code is janky
well guess what your formatting will
break so it'll give you a good hint that
hey I've got something out of you I've
got a parentheses off or I forgot to
close a quote or something like that but
just the thing
like like your standard so that you know
I'm dealing with a class instance versus
a class definition this is not like a
the class itself this is actually an
object instance or this is a local
variable maybe versus a global variable
or you know if there's something like
that or a lot of times this is like for
example this is a local variable to my
uh my method or my function as opposed
to one of the parameter variables that
was passed in uh things like
documentation is so like how do I
comment my code so that you know where
to look for your comments do I just jump
to the top of a page of my file and I
see everything there
or or I have trouble unmuting my mic
and uh sometime you know or is it
something where you you look down at
like the function level or something
like that and getting these standards in
place
not only helps other people because
they'll look at your code and it looks
like it was written by you know somebody
that knew what they were doing as
opposed to particularly if you've got
multiple developers they've got
different standards it looks like a mess
because it looks like 15 different
people wrote the codes you never really
know where to look things like that but
it also helps ourselves if I look back
and it's actually sort of funny because
I have evolved some of my standards over
the years they've changed and adjusted
and a lot of it actually
a lot of times you can see what language
I'm mostly coding in because that stuff
spills out into whatever other languages
I'm coding in at that time and it can be
challenging when I look back at stuff
from 10 or 15 or 20 years ago and I'm
like oh yeah that's right I always put
this thing here I did that thing there
and it does go to like structure and all
kinds of other stuff it's you know it's
things like probably all of us have
evolved from HTML how we approach that
as
uh CSS and JavaScript to become more and
more a part of that how do we and some
of it's just like where do we place like
our JavaScript files where do we put our
script tags and some things like that
it's it's all these little things that
build up build into our standards and
some of them yes are very much about U
you most efficient way to do something
but a lot of it really is just aesthetic
it's just so when you look at it it
looks like code that you wrote it's a
little bit putting your stamp on it and
as a team it's putting your team's stamp
on it so there's a lot of value in
getting to those standards and I'm going
to pass it to Mike before we talk a
little bit more about like implementing
those standards and getting into that so
what are your thoughts and some of your
experiences in this world yeah so you've
kind of touched on all the code like
styling standards and that I I liked a
lot of the examples I want to take it
slightly a little bit further than just
the coding standards so for instance
like over the years I've worked lot in
healthcare and financial uh
organizations and it's not just coding
standards we necessarily have to worry
about uh sometimes our coding standards
are actually impacted by industry
standards like Hippa sorban oxy socks
and we have to actually not just have
coding standards but also make sure that
our standards comply with uh you know
with government and legal uh
standards but within that you also if
you're depending upon what your
application is for so say You're
Building mobile apps or you're building
uh applications that are for specific
devices also understanding the
requirements or the standards for
instance uh deploying mobile apps to the
Apple App Store or Apple App Store you
have to comply with their standards in
order for your software to be able to be
approved and uh show up on the Apple
Store so is sometimes coding standards
aren't internal to your company
sometimes there are external factors to
what standards you have to actually meet
in order for your software to be uh
published and actually get out to the
public now flipping back a little bit
back into the coding standards one of
the biggest things I like to talk about
is always test testing but in this
particular case I want to focus on
documentation so you mentioned
documentation as we write our code
there's always a certain level of
requirements documentations uh software
requirements documents test documents
things of that nature when we typically
write our code we think about writing
comments within our code uh as
developers were not always great at that
but typically there's some type of
documentation in the code so that you
know what the code is for however I like
prefer to do the clean code approach
where when you write the code your
standards are essentially that your code
is going to be self-documenting it's
going to be clean code meaning that your
functions are going to be tailored to a
sing single unit of work or some
specific way that you write it is it's
human readable and you essentially can
just read the code and know exactly what
that particular function or that
particular class or object is supposed
to do uh that way you don't have to
really run around and write all these
comments everywhere unless there's some
complexity to it that you need to
highlight for instance oh this needs to
be in here to meet this particular
standard or hey we implemented this to
fix this
bug one thing I will throw out though is
if you are writing documentation or
troubleshooting code if you have spent
hours troubleshooting something and it
is a very uh elusive bug or something
that is not very well um I guess
identified within the industry for
instance if it's something you found and
no one else has it you've gone through
uh like stack Overflow you've gone
through um user boards you've gone
through Discord if it's something that
you are having a very hard time finding
if and when you do find the solution
make a comment about it if you have a a
link that took you hours to find but hey
here's the solution two things one you
could copy the link in and take a chance
that it's still going to be there 6
months to a year to 10 years from now or
you can copy the blur still provide the
link but copy the core piece of that
that hey this bug was introduced because
of this kind of give you know the cause
and effect here's what we found or
here's what the problem was here's how
we solved it and this is how we kind of
went about to find it now sometimes
putting that in code can be cumbersome
but depending upon your documentation
process if you keep it at the code
chances are it will always be there when
you need it if you put it in a Wiki or
on paper in some physical documentation
that could get lost over time so these
are just some ideas within some
additional ideas for your coding
standards to kind of improve the process
and keep your code clean self-d doent
and comply with those
standards so I'm going to go with the
challenge this time around is what this
is going to be painful to some of you
maybe all of us because it does touch on
one of the things I'm going to mention
is the word everybody hates which is
comments but your challenge for the week
ahead is every day take a few minutes
like you know less than 15 5 10 minutes
look at some C that you're you pick a
file that you're working on or a couple
files or a folder something like
that and review it based on whatever
your standards are what you're probably
going to find is you're going to find
some stuff where you're like your names
are not named right uh you may have
comments or missing for some of your F
from some of your functions uh or maybe
it's you know they're out of date a
little bit things like that let's really
just look at it and say do I follow my
own coding standards if you're like me
the answer is going to be a sounding no
and you're going to need to like go
clean some of that stuff up now the you
the funny thing is like as an example I
just recently spent a lot of time in
standard documents across a bunch of
different languages for a couple
different teams and they were pretty
consistent but then when I turned around
and was doing some coding there were a
couple of times that I caught myself
after I was like oh crap I didn't follow
my own standard that I had like grabbed
from Grant I guess not somebody else
took it from somebody else adopted it
and said let's this is what we're going
to do and then needed to clean my own
coat up so this is something for you is
just start thinking through those
standards because it is this is where it
really does help us to build a habit
because we have to think about the
standard when we're doing it it does
slow us down if it's just how we do this
then it's going to make things a lot
easier for us and for the team around us
now as far as the team is concerned is
if you don't have standards
documentation
then pick one you know you don't even
have to spend five minutes you can go
search like I used Google before if you
go out and Google search or whatever
your language you know your favorite
search engine is go look for Google's
coding standards they've got a whole
page that's full of all of these
different languages and what are the
standards they use and how do they you
know how they've got links to them and
all that kind of stuff so you can pick
the ones you use and just go boom we're
going to adopt this and try to do that
now you may also another great way to do
it
is pick one of these leners that are out
there that we've talked about before a
lot of them are built into your idees
you can set some stuff up in your
preferences so that it will just go look
and you're not going to get errors but
you will get warnings that say this does
not follow your coding standard fix
those just like pick a couple of those
and go do them a good example I'm just
going to give very specific is if you're
using python they have the pep eight
standards all of the IDS basically can
adopt to those I did it just other day I
spent 15 minutes walking through a
couple of files just looking at all the
little warnings I shut off the spelling
errors because it doesn't think anything
spelled right even if it is misspelled a
lot of times it's like it's a false
positive but all the other stuff I went
through and then just did a general
cleanup there's just it's very helpful
because there's a lot of things I'm like
oh yeah I should have done this
differently but sometime it's also like
very like there's it's very rewarding to
get to the end of a file and be like
this the system says it's clean says it
was not only it's sort of like if you
use grammarly it's like if you really
misspell and have bad grammar and then
you get to a point where it gives you
like a 100% And it's like everything's
lined up and it's exactly how it should
be you get like a little you feel like
you you're getting a gold star or a
smiley face or something like that so
that's your challenge every day this
week spend a little bit of time looking
at your code reviewing it and making
sure that you are following your
standards your team standards or
something along those lines and if you
don't know what they are then spend a
little bit of time each day this week
building out standards it's very simple
it's stuff like how what is the standard
for naming file names for folder
structures for variable names for you
how do I put where do I put my
parentheses and loops and all of those
sorts how do I indentation is it two
spaces three spaces is it tabs is it all
of that stuff just write it down
and build if you don't already have it a
personal set of coding standards for
yourself also bonus challenge send us an
email s us an email at info
developer.com let us know how you're
doing with the challenges what are some
challenges you'd like to see in the the
days and weeks ahead how you doing as
you get towards the end of the year what
are some things that you're looking
forward to in next year what are some
things that maybe you need to address
before this year ends out and we move
into 202 5 those are all things that
would' love to hear from you guys about
get some information some feedback and
see where we want to go next where this
can help us help you become better
developers you can also hit us up at out
on X at develop andur you can go to
develop or Channel at YouTube uh you can
go to developer.com you can lead us
leave us information via the contact
forms or comments uh feedback on any of
the blogs and and other articles that
are out there wherever you see wherever
you read here seed whatever consume
podcast we have stuff there so you can
like leave a leave us feedback there
leave us comments and and ratings and
whatever you want to do to give us some
feedback there we'd love to hear it that
being said it's time for us to go out
into our day so go out there and have
yourself a great day a great week and we
will talk to you next time bonus
material so we kind of mentioned it
through the podcast but uh you using
linters uh like things like sonar Cube
sonar lint are really helpful in kind of
at least standardizing your look and
feel of your code across uh development
environments one other thing is if
you're using an
idees uh for instance like if you have a
specific spacing or structure that you
want your code to be uh make sure that
you pick one uh Google has a lot of good
sites but pick one that works with your
IDE and then make sure everyone is using
the same linter that way when you go to
commit your code everyone formats
correctly and you don't have that one
person that formats every single line in
the code and now you can't figure out
what the code change was that sucks uh
so make sure that everyone is on the
same page early and that that way you
can kind of reduce the amount of time it
takes to kind of review the code and
make sure you know what people are
working on as a bonus bonus to that most
of these IDE will also allow you to
export all of those settings so you can
go in you can customize your your
lenting uh levels and some of the thing
you know the rules and and things like
that that it looks for you can export
those and share those around to all your
friends and yourself
so ideally if you've got something where
you can you're using like Visual Studio
code or one of those tools that actually
is a
multilingual uh environment uh although
most of them now are it's just you pull
it into your IDE and whether you're on
one machine or 18 machines you can pull
it in your IDs and you just you will
always have the same settings but for a
team it's really nice because if
somebody if the guy or gal next to you
isn't using standards you can just be
like hey import this and then before you
save next time or before you commit just
you know do the keystroke or the
whatever it is to do the auto
format and it saves you a lot of
headaches trust me when you get into the
world of like merging code one of the
most frustrating things is when it's all
just stupid white space kinds of stuff
that really does so it looks like the
files changed a lot and you've got
thousands of lines of code that have
changed but there's actually just one
line that actually changed so those
kinds of things do help a lot from a a
productivity point of view one last
bonus on top of that if you forget to do
that all the time like I have at times
and some people I know a lot of the IDS
now allow you to uh format on save so
every time you save your code it auto
formats fore so just a little tip on
that that kind of stuff is was very
helpful because yes we do forget all the
time it seems like we'll get in there
we'll throw stuff
off and then we forget to do it before
we safe as always we do appreciate you
guys everybody the time you've given
hanging out with us uh we have more
episodes to come we have holiday
specials in the weeks ahead that are
going to be coming and who knows how
crazy and informative those may or may
not be as we get into that point we wrap
up this year go out there and just
Embrace these last few weeks let's make
sure that you're knocking some stuff out
and then however far you want to get in
your building better developer Journey
at the end of the year that you can get
there as we get into these final weeks
go out there and help yourself a good
one and we will talk to you next time
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