Secret to development? Be tidy + clean
April 11th, 2005 by HenI’m wearing a disguise at work these days and spending 75% of my time up to my neck in database modelling as I seek to clean up datamodels a bit. Most of the Java I do is directly related to bits I’ve broken with my aggressive DROPs and the rest of my time is spent on trying to schedule it (and various code merging) in JIRA.
All of this reminds me of the one lesson I would hope that every new developer is prepared to learn as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how full of genius your code is, or how methodic your approach to a problem. It doesn’t matter if you use the newest techs, or build everything in AWT Applets and Model 0 JSP. Be tidy and clean in your code.
Part of this is a dogma of Agile; don’t do unnecessary work, but it’s more than just that. Whatever work you do, be tidy in how you do it. Frankly, I don’t care if your code is commented to the hilts, in fact over-commenting is a sure-sign of a clutterer. Being tidy about your development shows that (and encourages) you to care about your work, and that’s the underlying message. Care about what you do. That’s not to say that you have to think hard and slow; you can hack quickly and still remain clean, still care about the hack.
A nice self-test we can all do is to look at our desktops. Is it organised (as my Windows boxes all tend to be, despite it being my least favourite platform), or is it a mess (as my Powerbook tends to be because I’ve lazily let Firefox download to the Desktop). My Linux habits are different in that I don’t use the Desktop. For that respect I would point to the home directory, which is such a difficult thing to keep tidy.
I suspect I’m now hitting parallels with thought-police who demand a tidy desk at work. Clutter and mess is fine for creation and experimentation. My desk is always covered in a layer of mess. However I periodically tidy it and under the top layer is an organized set of piles, magazines, books etc.