Write Code as If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life

I think the answer lies in your frame of mind or, more plainly, in your attitude. If you don’t care about your fellow developers, testers, managers, sales and marketing people, and end users, then you will not be driven to employ Test-Driven Development or write clear comments in your code, for example. I think there is a simple way to adjust your attitude and always be driven to deliver the best quality products:

That’s it. If you accept this notion, many wonderful things will happen. If you were to accept that any of your previous or current employers had the right to call you in the middle of the night, asking you to explain the choices you made while writing the fooBar method, you would gradually improve toward becoming an expert programmer. You would naturally want to come up with better variable and method names. You would stay away from blocks of code comprising hundreds of lines. You would seek, learn, and use design patterns. You would write comments, test your code, and refactor continually. Supporting all the code you’d ever written for the rest of your life should also be a scalable endeavor. You would therefore have no choice but to become better, smarter, and more efficient.

By Yuriy Zubarev