What is Reusable?

What does reusable mean to you? Why would you want to use it?

In software, the concept of being “reusable” means that you design your code such that you can reuse it project-after-project with minimal to no rework of the code.

Think about that. Imagine the time you’ll save when you have a library of pre-built, well-tested, and proven code modules. You can then load the modules and quickly build your projects.

But the key is: minimal to no rework of the code. That is what makes it reusable.

Why? Think about it.

If you pull in a snippet of code or some boilerplate, yes, it will speed up your development time. However, you have to change the code in order to make it fit the project’s needs. When you touch the codebase, you introduce the potential for conflicts, wonky behavior, and bugs. You are literally changing the code that you previously tested and proved it to work. In doing so, you increase your time and costs over the entire lifecycle of the project and code.

What do I mean by software lifecycle?

Software has a lifecycle from the time you build it through testing to deployment and beyond into support and maintenance. Each of these phases has a monetary cost to it.

As a professional, this is your career and/or business. You need to improve your workflow and design approaches to reduce your time and costs. In doing so, you increase your profitability. This is a profession and a business. Every single hour you spend on a project increases its costs and reduces its profitability. This needs to be a concern for you; else, it’s just a hobby or a part-time thing.

Code Building Strategy

Reusable code reduces your time, costs, and bugs. A strategy that I’ve used throughout my entire career is a modular and configurable design approach which I call ModularConfig or ModularConfiguration.

Code is pre-built and well-tested as modules. These modules stand alone as some feature or enhancement. Then you add modules to your project to build custom themes and plugins. Next, you configure what is different for this project.

Configuration means that you’ve pulled the project differences out of the codebase to allow each project’s specific implementations to be loaded. You configure what’s different and then pass it into the module.

This approach is a different mindset. You have to think about how to build your code in this fashion.

One example is to build a module that allows plugins to serve up templates and web pages while allowing the theme to override it. Another is a code generator that takes a configuration for your custom post type and taxonomy. It generates the labels and arguments for you.

In this lab, you’ll learn about this approach and see it in action as we convert our plugin to the ModularConfig approach.