Code Like A Goldfish

A talk I gave at Telegraph Academy on how to write clean, maintainable and scalable code.

Transcript

1. Coding like a Goldfish Writing clean, maintainable, and “scale”-able code. Chris Arriola
2. About Me • Wrote 1st mobile app in grad school at UPenn (2010) • Hewlett-Packard (2010 - 2011) ◦ Android WebOS & Computer Vision Engineer - Small codebase (R&D) • Edmodo (2011 - 2013) ◦ Android & iOS Development - Large codebase (Production > 1M users) • Independent contractor (2014) ◦ Android Development - Many small codebases (Production 100 - 100,000+ users) • Operator (2015) ◦ Android, iOS, Python, and Javascript - Large codebase (Beta 1000+ users)
3. Goldfish.
4. “Programming is the art of telling another human what one wants the computer to do.” - Donald Knuth
5. • Easier to decentralize knowledge of the code base • Minimizes cognitive load • Maximizes code output • Increases Truck-Factor ◦ http://mtov.github.io/Truck-Factor/ Benefits
6. How to Write Code like a Goldfish?
7. • Design early • Don’t over optimize • Don’t repeat yourself (DRY) • Think small Tips
8. • Have design/architecture discussions early and talk to your team • Easy to find flaws early, hard and time-consuming to fix later • Critique thoroughly • “Pseudocode-Driven Development” • Hammock-Driven Development ◦ Talk given by Rich Hickey, creator or Clojure (on YouTube). Design Early
9. • Example: https://gist.github.com/arriolac/fd2431ab5e8c1cd9fac3 Design Early
10. Don’t Over Optimize • Optimizing code takes a lot of time • Optimize for performance later • ...but optimize for readability and understandability early
11. • e.g. a base class for displaying a list of groups public abstract class GroupsListFragment { // TODO: Currently both MyGroupsListFragment and JoinedGroupsListFragment are // making the same request and then filtering the results. We could optimize by // having those classes implement this method to return only the groups they care // about if the server API supported it. @Override protected NetworkRequest<JSONObject> createRequest(NetworkCallback<List<Group>> callback) { return (new GroupsRequest(callback)); } } Don’t Over Optimize
12. Don’t Over Optimize “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” - Donald Knuth
13. DRY • Duplication requires more lines of code • Duplication is error prone • Solve duplication through abstraction ◦ Create a method or a class • Example: https://gist.github.com/arriolac/b8fb810dd152848ff11d
14. Think Small • Write small files, methods, and classes • Smaller components are easier to test, swap, and change • Smaller files usually means good encapsulation
15. Think Small (e.g.) function getScaledBitmapThatFitsWithinBoundsAndHasQualityAndDoFixRotation(sourceFilePath, boundsWidth, boundsHeight, fixRotation) { // Do stuff… return image; }
16. Think Small (e.g.) function readImage(imageFilePath) { // Load image from file } function rotateImage(image, rotation) { // Rotate image by “rotation” } function scaleImage(image, scaleType) { // scale image from file } function resizeImage(image, width, height) { // resize image }
17. Think Small (e.g.) function ImageLoader(imageFilePath) { this.filePath = imageFilePath; this.loadImage = function(width, height) { image = readImage(this.filePath); resizeImage(width, height); // apply other image mutations return image; } }
18. Recommended Reading • “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas • “Design Patterns—Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm. Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides • “Refactoring” by Martin Fowler
19. Questions?