Coding philosophy (part 2)— the Code Monk

Monks pay a lot of attention to cleaning. It is a daily chore to maintain high level of cleaning in and around oneself.

"A clean surrounding and a clean body leads to a clean mind" - Monks' philosophy

Clean bathroom

When talking about cleaning, one of the most important parts of the household is bathroom. Everyone loves to use a clean bathroom. The ambience of a clean bathroom can calm us down, preparing us for the activities of the rest of the day. On the other hand, a messy bathroom causes anguish. It also reflects bad on the owner of the house, for visiting guests.

Maintaining a clean bathroom is a herculean task. It is the place where one is without any company. Thus, making it impossible to have any external control on the manners of the individual. It is not possible to deep clean the bathroom after every use, as it is both time and effort intensive. This effort becomes significantly greater as

• the size of the family grows, or
• guests visit

Monks use a very simple technique to overcome this problem -

The bathroom should be a little more cleaner after one uses it, than what it was before

Every user is responsible towards the cleanliness of the bathroom, just a little bit. This helps the monks maintain the cleanliness, even in the wake of great chaos.

Clean Code

Similar to the bathroom, everyone loves to work with clean code. But, it is very difficult to maintain code cleanliness. Significantly more so, as

• the size of the team maintaining the code base grows
• code is worked upon by others teams that are not responsible for the maintenance

Philosophy

Taking a clue from the monks, we can maintain clean code by improving its cleanliness just a little bit every time we work on it. Thus, avoiding the time and effort intensive cycles of complete overhauls. For this to happen, we the code monks should act responsibly.