Tag: development
GitHub flow
I’ve recently been attempting to contribute to some open-source GitHub projects with varying degrees of success. One thing that’s extremely useful to do before you start contributing is to develop a basic understanding of the standard GitHub workflow. It’s not especially complicated but it can be a real faff if you don’t do it correctly…
Load scripts last
So you’ve got your HTML and CSS sorted and you’ve started to drop in some customs scripts to make things a bit interactive. To keep things in shape it pays to develop some good habits early on. One such habit is placing your scripts just before the closing body tag like this: We do this…
No Comments
When I was first learning to code, something that came up a lot was to always comment your code. Code comments have value, but despite what my teachers at the time may have thought, you should try not to rely on comments. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t communicate to the reader what the code…
DRY variables
The concept of DRY code is simple, Don’t Repeat Yourself. So if you look at some code you’ve just written and notice it’s looking a bit moist, AKA the same stuff repeating over and over, there’s a good chance it’s an opportunity to refactor. This is also true with variable declaration. Take the this example:…
Equals vs equals
In JavaScript not all comparisons are created equal… see what I did there. Let’s say we’re comparing two values like this: The use of “==“ will compare two values regardless of their type, so in this example, it will return “The meaning of life is 42”. Used correctly this can be fine of course, but…
Zombie code
Part of developing (and certainly learning to develop) is creating code, commenting it out, and creating a better version. As you get into a flow state with coding it’s really easy to get into the habit of doing this and not going back and clearing out the undead code comments. Here’s an example of what…
Keep your friends close and your variables closer
Back in the day, I used to have this habit of declaring all of my variables at the top of the file. My thinking at the time was it would keep everything organised so if I needed to jump to one I’d know where to go looking. While that might sound like a sensible approach…
How to function correctly
Coding is a fairly amazing thing to be able to do. There are effectively no limits to what can be done when you’re more or less writing the universe from scratch. Having said that if Spider-Man movies have taught us anything (and I think we can all agree they have) it’s that with great power…
Simplify conditional statements
Consider the following code: Looks good right? It’s logical and easy to understand, just your standard if statement. All true, but over the course of an entire project you’ll make a lot of considtional statements like this and using 5 lines of code when 1 will do can create some serious size increases to your…