• Using Contextual Code Formatting for Readability - I used to care a great deal about having a coding standard. I often took the initiative to write a document for the team that described the do’s and don’ts, and I was often the one setting up automated formatting sniffers on every commit. I’ve come to see that we have been ignoring an opportunity to use formatting to our advantage. By arguing and voting over standards, and building automated tools to do the formatting for us, and refusing commits that failed the formatting validators, we lost track of why we needed a standard in the first place. It’s not to fulfil the desire of the pedants in our teams, or for the esthetic of neatly aligned spaces. The goal should be to write easily readable and maintainable code. [Mathias Verraes]

Permalink | From 31 December 2012 to 06 January 2013 | Last updated on: Mon, 7 Jun 2021 09:18:52 GMT

• How to read more books - “You can’t learn everything from books”, people say. It’s nothing but an excuse not to read books. It’s a straw man argument, because no-one has ever claimed that you can. Or, “knowledge from experience can’t be taught in a book”. Even though that’s true, there are many people out there with years of experiences that you will never have. Some of them are very good at sharing at least some of that gained knowledge through writing. [Mathias Verraes]

Permalink | From 17 December 2012 to 23 December 2012 | Last updated on: Mon, 7 Jun 2021 09:18:52 GMT