What are the Best Practices for Writing Clean and Efficient Code?

When we learn new skills like programming, there’s a tendency to unknowingly pick up some bad practices. The problem is that unless someone tells you that you’re doing it wrong, those bad practices may stick with you in the long run. This post will cover the good coding practices that you can develop early, so that you don’t have to break bad ones later on. 

Practice Makes Perfect

Practice programming regularly - everyday if possible, but it’s totally fine to skip a day or two. Try to get out of “tutorial hell” as soon as possible and instead do small daily chunks of a personal project. It doesn’t matter what the project is, as long as it’s challenging and interesting enough to keep you motivated. I’m sure that most people in the tech space are already familiar with the 100 days of code challenge, which is perfect for initially getting into the habit.

The first personal projects that I did were for automating daily tasks for work, such as producing weekly revenue reports and sending reminder emails to clients with overdue invoices. When my friend group did secret santa a few years ago, I wrote a quick Google apps script to randomly assign people and then send everyone an email notification letting them know who their secret santa was.

I’ve gradually challenged myself with larger projects like gohan_dousuru, an automation project to generate meal plans and grocery lists for daily cooking.

Here are some of the personal projects on my list, in order from easiest to most difficult.

1. Create an email newsletter template in html.

2. Add a cumulative visitor counter to my personal website.

3. Web scraping and text me when a new issue of my favourite manga comes out.

4. Build an app to manage my kitchen pantry inventory.

5. Computer adaptation of a card or board game like Quarto, Battle Line, or poker. ※ I am not an expert on copyright law, but be careful with fan games because they could cause legal trouble. Do not make them distributable such as by putting it on a public Github repo and creating a link. 

Even if you’re just working alone on a hobby project, it’s good practice to use a version control system like Git and do atomic commits. 

If possible, find someone to do pair programming, which often results in cleaner and more efficient code. Try to also get in the habit of gracefully using loops, dictionaries, and dynamic variable names for more elegant code. 

Finally, well-documented code is a valuable asset to any team. If you publish on github, include a readme file that concisely explains how to set up the software. The documentation can also include use cases, debugging scenarios, and acknowledgements for any resources that you found helpful and would like to give credit to.