Leaving It Better Than I Found It.

Promises of Quality Are Everywhere. Delivery Isn't.

Lip service isn't good enough. A lot of places will proclaim Agile Methodology, but that seems to mean something different wherever you go. Words are only words, but I like to write code that lets me sleep at night, especially when it's being published to an end user. What does that mean to me?

Testing. Writing code that lets me sleep at night means writing code that's tested as well as I can make it. It's important to validate my own assumptions about what the code is doing, much less anyone else's. I want to be sure I'm getting the results I expect at every step of the software's flow, and I've found any number of bugs by writing tests that revealed we were not, in fact, getting what we expected from a given input.

Readability. As developers, we spend a lot more time reading code than writing it. If I can make that easier for the next developer, then everyone's work gets faster. That means looking for ways to simplify and abstract and separate concerns. It means looking for places where I can take an options object instead of 10 function parameters, or where I can create a separate file with a thoroughly tested helper function instead of bloating a component with lines upon lines of logic that's hard to write tests for. It means thinking about whether something is easy to understand at a glance, and if it's not, what can I do to make it easier to read?

Documentation. I've been on projects where it took a day of research and trial and error to figure out how to do a procedure, such as setting up a local environment for validating infrastructure code changes, or running test deployments. I could try to walk the next people who need to do it through the process - or I could document it, step by step, with screenshots. Even better, sometimes I can write a script to just reliably reproduce the whole flow so the next developer just needs to run the script.

Better code isn’t just a technical improvement. It's a foundation for happier teams, better products, and loyal customers.