Being consistent

I have observed that new projects do not offer much to learn than old aged projects. Older projects, having footprints of many developers also carry mistakes by those developers.

In such a situation, I don’t really need to make many mistakes to learn. I already have mistakes by other developers, I just need to observe and be careful about making these mistakes next time.

Working on an antique (not really antique, it is just 6 months old) project, I have found that

Poor concentration on naming conventions make it ugly, really hard to read, or even understand the code.

I am going through this phase and I can tell you it’s really cumbersome. It pisses me off whenever I look at it.

Put it all aside, let’s discuss how we should name things as programmer/software developers. Back in the days, I was very careful about naming conventions and believe me I am still very concious about it. I used spend hours while searching the best convention for a given context.

After searching a bit, I used to go with some convention but eventually, I have found that

No matter what convention you choose or no matter what convention you think is the best, if you have chosen one; stick to it for the rest of the project. This is the only most important thing in the world of conventions. Don’t mix many conventions. Chose one and use it throughout the project.

While writing this closing para, I got this beautiful verse in my mind

دو رنگی چھوڑ ، یک رنگ ہو جا

Do rangi chor, yak  rang ho ja

Sara moum, ya phir sang ho ja ...

Although it is not written in programming context, it fits nicely here. See you next time.