Notes to Myself on Software Engineering

A laundry list of personal reminders

7 min readSep 8, 2018

Code isn’t just meant to be executed. Code is also a means of communication across a team, a way to describe to others the solution to a problem. Readable code is not a nice-to-have, it is a fundamental part of what writing code is about. This involves factoring code clearly, picking self-explanatory variable names, and inserting comments to describe anything that’s implicit.
Ask not what your pull request can do for your next promotion, ask what your pull request can do for your users and your community. Avoid “conspicuous contribution” at all cost. Let no feature be added if it isn’t clearly helping with the purpose of your product.
Taste applies to code, too. Taste is a constraint-satisfaction process regularized by a desire for simplicity. Keep a bias toward simplicity.
It’s okay to say no — just because someone asks for a feature doesn’t mean you should do it. Every feature has a cost that goes beyond the initial implementation: maintenance cost, documentation cost, and cognitive cost for your users. Always ask: Should we really do this? Often, the answer is simply no.
When you say yes to a request for supporting a new use case, remember…