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Your code should tell a story: Tips for writing code for others to read

Tom Collins on February 24, 2020

When we write code, we are also writing a story for other developers. Here are a few tips on how we can write code for our future selves and other...
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Charles Szilagyi

Nice one, should get more ❤️s!

By the way, I guess you meant

const entity = {
  UNDERGRAD: 'underGrad',
  POSTGRAD: 'postGrad',
}

getResultsFromDB({ entity: entity.UNDERGRAD, courseId: 'SCIENCE_101'})

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Tom Collins

haha yes. That would very much negate the advantage here!

Nice spot. Article updated.

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David Gavilan

I think userPassedCourse should be called userFailedCourse. Or at least, having a low mark suggests or low attendance suggests failure. But then, you switch passing false to passing true from one example to the next, so even if you are trying to refactor it to make it more readable, I'm getting really confused by the example.

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Tom Collins

Changed to:
user.result > 40 && user.attendance > 50

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Gábor Soós

Nice examples for promoting Clean Code!

Intention revealing code is prior to code length. There is a different tool for code length and it's called minifier.

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Alex Lohr

If you can, use TypeScript to document the API. The reading flow is better than with plain JSDoc. The IDE integration will make working with your code a pleasure. Pro-Tip: use JSDoc comments to comment more complex types - this documentation will then be shown on hover in modern IDEs.

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Tom Collins

I used Typescript a couple of years ago. I definitely want to pick it back up again.

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Pavel Ermakov

I really like these tips. Thank you!

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Ghost

I've read some Lovecraftian code.

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Stephen Smith

Thanks for the read. Very informative.

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Tom Collins

Amen. The frameworks are the kings of the jungle right now.

I do love React but the building blocks of clean code are the key to having a nice codebase.

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Tom Collins

Fixed. Thanks for letting me know!

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George WL • Edited

I also feel like courseID could be an enum, if there's a set number of course IDs