What Your Messy Code Is Costing You

Right now, naming that variable or building that helper function doesn’t seem critical… but messiness will catch up with you over the long haul.

The Cost of a Mess

I’m currently reading Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code. It’s a book that has become a touchstone in software development because it focuses on a problem so many developers have encountered: messy code bases and how they get that way.

If you’re a working developer or a student of writing good software, this book is an important read. In this short article, I’ll share the basic tenets of clean coding, and why you should care.

In the first chapter, Martin tells the story of a software project:

• The project starts off great, and the developers on the project are highly productive while the code base is small and they can understand what the whole program does
• Over time, however, new stuff gets added and new people join the team. It becomes difficult for the established developers to remember what code does what and good luck to the new devs learning the code base
• Soon, every change to the code creates two new issues somewhere else. Productivity grinds to a slog as you’re constantly putting out fires and resolving bugs
• As the mess builds, the…