Goodbye, Clean Code

Before taking this class, I didn’t know of any guidelines for writing code. Clean code is a guideline with an objective to make code easier to understand, maintain, and read. By following its principles, a developer makes projects more likely to succeed in the long term. Learning this, I thought that I should try to implement this in all I code I make, and am still trying to make clean code practices common in my code. However, in a blog post: “Goodbye, Clean Code” by Dan Abramov, he says to “let clean code guide you, then let it go”. This was interesting, since wouldn’t having clean code all the time be nice to have for understanding the code you write? Dan during the time he recalls in the post thought so too.

In this post, Dan recalls a time when he was working on a project and checking his colleague’s code they had just turned in. The code had tons of repetitive code and math that would take a second to process. Bothered by this, he fixed it to look cleaner, removing the repetitiveness and making it so there could be changes in one spot rather than multiple methods. This resulted in a request that he reverts the changes he made from his boss, which he reluctantly agreed to do. Looking back at this event, the author says it took years to understand his boss was right. Calling clean code a phase of a coder’s life and explaining that chasing that guideline was forgetting about the human aspect of coding. Firstly, he changed his colleague’s code without discussion, which was a terrible decision when working in a team where they needed to collaborate. Secondly, he realized later that the changes he made would have impacted the project severely and added complications if he had kept them.

This blog post was not saying there was a problem with clean code itself, but how people treat clean code as an absolute guideline like the author did in the past. This post helped me understand chasing clean code is more of a detriment to yourself and others on your team and to not get too obsessed with it. Getting hung up on this aspect makes you lose sight of your project and team’s goals in mind. I think that people should keep writing clean code but not lose themselves to chasing a standard in a way that makes writing that code meaningless. While I haven’t experienced this, I can sort of understand it as how I was trying to implement these principles in my code after learning of them.

References: https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/