The Why of Clean Code

There are two main principles which will accelerate your career in this profession: fundamentals and clean, quality coding techniques. Mastering these, incrementally building yourself up and incorporating them into your workflow and code will make you more in demand and marketable. Why? Why is clean, quality coding so important?

Clean code means quality. You are increasing the quality of the product you are producing. Why? By breaking up your code into modules, having a function do just one thing and behavior, purposefully naming variables and functions, and making your code more readable, you are reducing the maintainability costs of code. Quality increases not only the perceived value but also the realized value.

Remember that when you are fixing bugs, that task is taking you away from building projects, especially after you’ve shipped to your client. You’ve already been paid. And unless you are being paid for the actual time it takes you to find the root cause and resolve it, the money in your (or your company’s) pocket decreases. Why? Because you are not spending your valuable time on producing software solutions. Instead, you’re working on bugs in past projects.

But the reality is: bugs will exist and you will spend time on past projects. Therefore, maintainability means you can isolate to more quickly find the root cause.

Obviously, you want your code to be of the highest quality possible. Right? It is your art and a piece of you. It is a reflection of you. So quality has another side to it, as you become even more proud of the work you deliver.

For all of us, quality means we can read each other’s code and help one another resolve issues or make it better. It serves not only you, your company, and your client, but the entire ecosystem.

In this episode, you will learn more about the why of clean code, or as I call it: clean, quality coding.