Ever heard of the phrase, “settle for less and you won’t get the best”? No? Well that’s because I made it up. Besides that, I’m sure you can relate to this analogy. Remember that time in your life when you looked down at yourself and then you looked right over to next guy and thought “geez, I could be like that person if I did x, y, z too”, or think “woah, what in the world is that person”. Well my friend, the difference between people are their standards.
You see, in programming everyone is different, we have people who prefer C rather than java, people who religiously puts spaces before curly brackets and people who don’t, and etc. Well there are people who have coding standards and people who don’t. So why have coding standards? Well, going back to the analogy in the previous paragraph, think of the guy with coding standards as the person everyone admires.
Having coding standards is the holy grail that every programmer needs. It gives you the opportunity to have cleaner code, and therefore, it won’t be a hassle trying to figure out what you wrote. Being able to have a good form and technique will allow you to elevate your performance. Not only that, those days of searching for about half an hour to find a missing curly brace are over!
Recently, I am working with ESLint on IntelliJ and boy, what a tragedy I am with all these errors scattered across my file. Even though ESLint reminds me of my nagging mother, in the end it is correcting my poor life decisions and pushes me to become the potential programmer I can be. Overall, as I sit here every day experiencing frustration with every error I may receive, at least I know in the end I am ingraining quality coding habits in to me and it will all be worth it.