Got called out by a senior dev in Denver and it changed my coding habits

I was at a team meeting in Denver about 3 months ago, and our lead developer looked at my code on a shared screen during a code review. He said "this function is doing too many things at once and it's going to break later." I thought I was being efficient by cramming everything into one block, but he showed me how splitting it into smaller pieces made it way easier to test and fix bugs. After that, I started breaking my work into smaller tasks and using cleaner variable names. It saved me about 10 hours of debugging on my last project. Has anyone else had a senior call them out on something simple that totally shifted how you work?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy_ross15d ago

Man, I had a senior dev once tell me my variable names looked like I was trying to name my cats. Changed everything for me.

kim81914d ago

Cat names might actually be better for some things. @nancy_ross, at least you can remember a cat name like "Whiskers" in two seconds flat compared to some business jargon like "transactionalEntityProcessor_v2." Sometimes overly specific naming actually makes code harder to skim because you have to read the whole thing to know what it does. Short and memorable beats long and descriptive in a lot of cases.