Building a Newbie-Friendly Codebase
Pedro Santos has published a set of suggestions for making a codebase easier for newcomers to work in.
- Adopt naming conventions that can be learned once and applied everywhere.
- Use unidirectional data flows, so the app flow is easy to follow.
- Avoid magic numbers — and note that they are even worse in CSS, where they cause confusion and are often tied to awkward or incorrect assumptions.
- Use data structures, such as state machines.
- Test everything.
- Prefer good code over good comments.
- Avoid acronyms.
- Refactor opportunistically.
