Tips for best practices
I’ve been working in the Web industry for about 12 years. During these years, I started to read about best practices in web development. I found a lot of them useful, both to ensure a better quality to my work, but also to make it easier - and sometimes quicker. I’m not claiming to have the best solutions to everything, the following tips are just a few of the things I try to do when coding. Some apply to (X)HTML or CSS, others are more appropriate to PHP or even JavaScript. Some are valid when working in a team, others when working alone.
-
Follow conventions.
This is valid both for team and solo work. When working on your personal projects, pick a style and stick to it. When working with a team, either agree with a coding style with the team or, if one is already chose, use it - even if it’s different than yours. It will make it easier for both you and your team members to understand your code.
-
Validate HTML and use semantically correct markup.
HTML tags have a meaning. A <p> indicates a paragraph. A <ul> indicates a list. Valid HTML has meaning, both to humans and machines.
Validating HTML may help you find errors in your code. Not just markup errors, but also display errors. Something that may look great in a browser may look terrible in another. And most of the time, you have to support more than one browser.
-
Comment your code
This one will never be repeated enough. Commenting helps you and team members. In six month, you may not remember what you did today. Comment! Comment! Comment!
-
Don’t commit incomplete or buggy code
Except on rare occasions, it’s better to never commit incomplete or buggy code when using a source control tool. Stuff that goes into the common repository is supposed to work.
-
Keep team members informed
Communication is important. You refactoring code, you need to let team members know. Email is useful. Documentation is better. When you create a new library, let team members know about it. If they don’t know about it, they may create something that does pretty much the same thing. Time wasted.
-
Be consistent when indenting.
This is good for whatever language you use. Consistency in indentation helps finding your way around your code. By indenting, you can quickly see blocks of code or remove unused blocks.
-
White space is your friend
Yes, this goes with the consistency in indentation. But white space also means inserting white lines between statements or functions. But don’t overuse it. There’s no need to put 10 carriage returns between blocks of code.
-
Google too
Yep, Google is your friend. Your best friend. If you have a problem, chances are, you’re not the first one. It’s probably documented on mailing lists or Stack Overflow. Google knows, Google remembers!
-
IRC channels
It’s amazing who you may run into on an IRC. Lots of people hang around on those channels and may help you. If you ask nicely and respect the channel’s rules.
-
Use available tools: good IDE, debugger, Firefox addons.
A good IDE will help you in may ways: auto-complete built-in functions, sometimes a built in debugger or direct access to your version control tools.
Firefox has great addons such as Firebug, the web developer tool bar or the regular expression tester that could save you lots of headaches.
-
Check logs
Logs may indicate problems. Apache logs, PHP logs… The information you may find in these logs may prove useful. But you need to learn how to read them!
-
PHP Errors
In a development environment, set your php.ini’s error reporting to E_ALL and display_errors to ON. This can help tracking errors and solving problems. But make sure you change this when going online.
What are your tips? What techniques do you use to ensure the quality of your code?
June 10, 2009 - 12:50 PM No Comments
