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One Habit To Become a Better Developer
And it’s something that you probably do anyway
In my line of work, I read code all day, every day, be it code reviews of new features or making out head or tail of old ones. If you’re like me, you might even be going through code bases over decades old.
That’s almost three centuries in the computer world. (It’s a millennial thing to say. There’s no real scale; it’s just really, really old.) And I am new and green in this world. Reading code is the best way to find out what the application does.
That last statement seems simple, but domain knowledge is sometimes lost over the years, leading to code that does what it’s supposed to do, but no one knows why anymore.
Many people who wrote the application have now left (or retired or are dead).
Comments are helpful in pointing to the direction to think in, but most old code doesn’t have them. It wasn’t very important to do that back then. It’s not considered important enough even today, but hunting for business reasons for embedded logic is a pain. (Personal experience. There were tears involved.) As a result, I try to add nice verbose comments all over my code.
