koleir

I have a few key indicators that I follow when writing or reviewing code in order to make sure its quality is acceptable:

• Being Readable is in my opinion the most important factor. Code is meant to be read and understood by humans before computers (they can often figure it out anyways) and to achieve this it has to be a pleasant experience: it should be well spaced out, use descriptive variable and function names, be organized in logical units split across a well thought out file tree, use comments where it makes sense, etc. Readable code is maintainable code.
• Quality code should be Expressive: it does what it looks to be doing. It might sound like this is the same thing as readability but here we are more concerned about the fact that the programmer's intent shows through the code without the need to resort to comments to explain what they want to achieve.
• The code should also be Kept simple because being simple means it will be easy to pick up on it a few weeks or month later and easier for devs of all levels to understand. To keep it simple it should not rely on numerous complex abstractions for the sake of having some. Classes and modules should keep a small and specific API surface, functions should operate on a small number of parameters, etc.
• Finally, it should remain on Topic which is a way of saying that it should do what it is expected to do and nothing more. This is an application of the YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) principle which dictates that you should not implement things ahead of time and focus on what is asked at a given moment. I think that this principle pairs well with the fact that code should be tested to ensure that it does what it is asked to do. When reviewing code the topic is easy to define as it is most commonly the story/task/issue/bug you are working on, so the code should address that and nothing else (i.e. do not commit a huge Prettier reformatting of the code base in the same PR where you are fixing a bug!).

Yes, that makes REKT as an acronym and yes I find it mildly funny 😄