Bruno Peeters Technical Blog

When you read a certain magazine or newspaper, you don’t have the feeling that the articles are written by a number of persons each having their own personalities and characteristics. When reading the first article, you can’t decide when looking at another article by looking at the use of words if it is written by the same person or not. The same strategy we see back at clean written code: it will show consistency throughout the solution. If applied well, you can’t tell that some class is written by one developer and another class by another developer.

What is actually the benefit of having all code written down like it is written by the same person? Note that we spent more time reading back code than we spend time at writing the code. If this is the case, you want fellow programmers to quickly grasp the main important things you want to achieve by the code you’ve written. One thing that helps with this is having the same coding style all over the same code base.

Since I see writing code as a craftmanship, I’m also very keen on writing high quality code. In the beginning it might take more time to write your code with a high quality, but in the end this will pay back. For sure the bigger a project becomes, more time it will take to add or change functionality or fix bugs in poorly written code.

When it comes to high quality code, of the aspects that come to mind is that it’s clean code. Clean code helps your team to write and maintain in an efficient way your code base. What properties must programming code have to become clean? Robert C. Martin (a.k.a. Uncle Bob), describes in his book “Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship” a number of aspects clean code could have. In this blog, I want to discuss the key takeaways I found within this book.