Code quality
7 articles in this category
Why We Should Stop Writing 'Smart' Code
Writing clever, concise, one-liner code is a common developer ego trip. In practice, 'smart' code is a maintenance liability that increases cognitive load, slows down debugging, and confuses your colleagues. Readable code is boring, obvious, and explicit.
The Fallacy of DRY: Why You Should Write Duplicated Code First
Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is one of the first design principles programmers learn. But applying it too early creates tightly coupled, hyper-flexible abstractions that crumble under the weight of changing requirements. Write duplicated code until the structure reveals itself.
Your Unit Tests Are Mocking You
Unit testing with mocked dependencies has become a software industry obsession. We write tests that verify our code behaves against mock assumptions, resulting in green test suites that pass while production crashes. It is time to embrace integration tests with real, lightweight dependencies.
Clean Code: The Cult of Dogma and Why Your Abstractions Are Probably Wrong
Robert C. Martin's Clean Code shaped a generation of developers, but its dogmatic rules about tiny functions, obsessive DRY, and terrible example code have caused more harm than good. Here's what the book got right, what it got catastrophically wrong, and what to read instead.