Adhering to Standards
24 Sep 2019
An Uphill Battle
Being shackled to code in a certain way, to follow certain rules and adhere to strict regulations might seem like an arduous and menial task in the beginning. One already knows that documentation is important, but is formatting of said documentation really worth it. This annoyance travels further to writing code, seems superfluous to always add a space before the first curly brace of the function block. I thought documentation and formatting of said documentation was what the coding standards entailed, but little did I know that these were naive thoughts. Adding parenthesis’ on the argument on an arrow function, space after the words if, while, for; horrendous. Or so I thought, I realized that the luxury that linting provides is to ensure that my eyes won’t bleed when I have to look back at my spaghetti code.
Acceptance
I’m now a convert, I think there is no other way to code and format projects. As stated, there is no headache caused by positioning of certain curly braces, brackets, parenthesis. The work itself is not entirely seamless, but the fact that it produces consistent and clean code means that for the sake of professional growth this growing pain is inevitable. This moreso becomes a serious topic due to what types of codebases we - as aspiring developers - will encounter. We will get turned away from ugly, saucy, mismanaged code and as such we should leave behind a legacy that is paved within the standard set forth by our workplace. If such standards are not in place at the beginning and thankfully ICS 314 provided us with a foundation that will allow us to develop professional standards.
Understanding
In conclusion, in the beginning - like many things - problems will arise. It’s our perceived difficulty and lack of willingnesss to change that will turn annoyances into serious issues within a codebases standard. In reality, such standards are put in place by developers with good intentions and even better understanding of the impact that bad cases will have on future developers. My software engineering class’ teaching assistant likened coding standards as the notes in sheet music. The notes are guidelines to what the music is supposed to sound like, but by itself it is not music. It’s merely conventions to follow and adhere to, as we finish our tasks.