Coding Practices

GenAI has killed the coders vibe
With vibe coding, who needs code reviews.
You’re just swamped in code that you struggle to make sense of.
Regardless, for hooman coders, some basic guidelines still apply.

The pareto principle
Most programmers spend 80% of their time writing routine stuff: naming variables, writing loops, decomposing problems to the function level.

Writing good code: the Quality Gate you should be concerned about
Bad code is hard to understand.
And understanding – or improving communication – is key to any social activity.
Software development is a social activity – many CXO’s don’t grok this in their GenAI obsession. It requires communication and interaction between people to gain an improved understanding of the problem and the solution.

Coding Rules

If you accept that coding is communication, you need to extend certain civic courtesies as a rule:

1. Naming (variables, functions):
   1. focus on clarity by using self-documenting names that make the purpose clear
   2. stay true to the problem domain. If code stays true to the language of business, it helps create seamless communication between business and development.
2. Basic Hygiene: Following style guides. It’s annoying to see dead code, and code that lacks spacing between tokens, line breaks, and indentation.
   Intellij menu options:

    Reformat Code             Ctrl + Alt + L
    Auto-Indent Lines         Ctrl + Alt + I
    Optimize Imports          Ctrl + Alt + O
   

3. Linting: enable SonarLint in the IDE and make a habit of checking warnings before pushing to the repo.