I have been spending a large portion of my time reviewing my design for an application I’m working on… and part of it involves deciding whether what I wrote made sense.
When I was reading through my code, I saw that certain portions of the code had comments. They seemed innocent enough, basically explaining my thought process and what was the purpose of a given method or the next set of code lines. I thought that I was providing good information to whoever would need to read it (including myself).
However, as I’ve been learning more about good software development practices, I realized that the comments I wrote were written purely because the code wasn’t written intuitively. Without the comments, the lines of code were unclear. I wasn’t quite sure why I did what I did, especially since it was weeks since I first wrote it.
So, I found the following two actions to greatly help improve the readability of my code.