How to Keep Your Code Clean and Easy to Understand

Being able to write clean code is crucial to becoming a better software developer. Not only will this practice make your life easier, but it will help others who are accessing your code and work to grow your reputation as a developer who is known for being thorough. This article is a high-level run-through of different tips and techniques that you can use to write clean and understandable code in a project; helping you to maintain code for a longer period of time without any hassle.

What is clean code?

To understand clean code we first need to have an idea of what bad code is — then we can identify problems and solutions to achieve clean code from there.

There is a famous analogy about defining bad code that is first narrated by Thomas Holwerda, later in Robert C Martin’s book, in which the measurement of code quality in WTFs/minute!

The original image can be found here.

Suppose we wrote a piece of code and some other teammates are reading or reviewing the code. If they immediately understand what the code is meant to do, that’s good code. But sometimes we ourselves can’t even understand something that we wrote a few months ago because we ignored understandability practices and wrote bad codes!

Meaningful Names

Sometimes we developers say that naming something is the toughest job while writing code, yes indeed! A variable, function, or a class should be self-explanatory to the person who is reading the code, which makes naming very important.

Look at this sample code:

Here, we can see two variables list1 and list2 but from the names, we are not getting what the values are or the types of these variables. Here comes the first tip (i.e. using intention-revealing names which also helps developers to stop the spread of disinformation). Please also note that the arrow function inside the filter has the argument named item. This is not very clear…