Archive for January 20th, 2009

Having to glean over all of the information, make heads and tails of the other person’s work just doesn’t appeal to me at all.  It is a constant struggle to make sure my additions fit in place with the existing design.  It’s like adding a modern kitchen to a one-hundred year old house–the standards for building are different, and things get complicated.

Keeping clean code has always been a practice of mine, whether it’s simply making sure tags are nested properly within each other or commenting code that could potentially be confusing to another party.  It sometimes can be an annoying practice, but I’ve ended up thanking myself in the long run (when a customer wants a change made and I had to dig through my code again).

Now, commenting code and nesting tags are only part of the equation!  When I begin a new project, I find it wise to have a firm convention for naming things ($camelCasingVariables, using_underscores_in_your_filenames, and adding relative id=”" tags for sections of HTML code).

Keeping these things in mind, I have cut my production time down significantly.  I have also cut the time it takes for a future examiner of my code to figure out just what is going on inside.  As a result, the customer can be served more quickly and efficiently whenever they make a request for changes.

The need for good naming conventions, nested tags and commenting code might be greek to most people, but the bottom line is this: when you’re looking for a good website developer, it’s important to find out a thing or two about the back-end of the work they do. What does their code look like? How easy is their work manipulated by other developers–future developers?