Posts tagged “code quality”

Good code does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Testability, elegance, extensibility matter, but they're secondary. Late code isn't good code. Code that never ships needs no maintenance. Everything else is nuance.

Unit testing isn't about finding bugs, it's about preventing them. Tests written alongside code catch silly mistakes, document correct usage for other devs, and verify edge cases. Best of all, they provide certainty: after a refactor or dependency upgrade, passing tests mean everything still works.

Responding to an MSNBC piece on bad software: unlike engineers who rebuild flawed machines from scratch, coders patch and graft changes onto existing code. All those shortcuts and compromises compound into garbage. Code reuse isn't the answer. That's why software sucks.