Sparking Joy in Code
Explore how to write code that others enjoy by avoiding unnecessary complexity, giving meaningful names, writing insightful comments, and designing helpful error messages. Understand techniques for improving code readability and maintainability to create joyful coding experiences.
Avoid hasty abstractions
“Hell does not understand my own code.”
Code is read more than it is written. If your code isn’t a joy to read, it will be difficult to use and dreadful to refactor. Avoid hasty abstractions as much as possible.
We constantly need reminders to avoid code complexity:
- From Fred Brooks warning us about accidental complexity to Rich Hickey exhorting us to decomplect
- From Bob Martin teaching us to write Clean Code to Kent Beck teaching us to write sensible tests for them
- From Sophie Alpert (former manager of React) encouraging us to facilitate local reasoning to Dan Abramov showing us to design code that