best-practices

I just finished reading the book Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, and in an effort to keep that book alive with me a little while longer, I decided to make my own Cliffs Notes version of the book here. I share each quote from the book that I've highlighted, along with my own thoughts about why I think that quote is so good.

Writing clean code

Here's a short collection of quotes from Clean Code, with my comments added after each quote.

"Later equals never."

I ran across the following page in the book Clean Code, and it really caught my attention. In short, there is a programming language named LOGO that apparently used to keyword TO in the same way languages like Scala and Ruby use "def". This is described near the bottom of the page in the following image, in the area I highlighted:

Some long time ago I was working on a software development project, and I wasn't happy with either the quality or the velocity of our programming effort. So one night I sat down and tried to work out an activity diagram to show what our software development process needed to be, to improve both speed and quality. It turns out that a lot of this is just common sense, but for some reason or another team members would try to circumvent the process, which always led to more pain for everyone involved.

Wow, I've been reminded lately how important deadlines are.

I've been working on this website all summer, but at a moderate pace. Then recently I put together some goals for the end of the year, which, in turn, led to other short-term goals. Now, it turns out that my short term goals are hard to meet, but not impossible.

Summary: An Apple design secret - the connection between attitude and productivity.

Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the content over at technologyreview.com, but they had a nice article a while ago on "The Secret of Apple Design." I really like a quote they had about a person's attitude, and the relationship of that attitude and the impact on their work: