Beautify your Code!

As you probably all know, I work as software developer. In my day job, I have to work with both, code I developed earlier and code other developers wrote. I try to always keep an eye on nicely formatted code. Unfortunately not everyone does so. Some code I have to deal with, is plain ugly. While it is syntactically correct, it is, for example, not aligned in any logical way. In my opinion, that’s a very bad thing.

If you’re a developer, especially a young developer, new to developing software: Make it a habit to format your code nicely. I know that’s hard. You have to struggle with the pitfalls of a new language and formalism does not seem like something that brings you forward. Maybe it doesn’t in the beginning. But as with a clean script, once you developed your own style, it is very hard to change it. Always remember: While you write the code once, you will read it several times. It’s more important to make it easy to read then easy to write.

If you do not believe me, configure your editor to use the same color for both, code and background. This way you can still read the code by selecting if you really need to but normally you won’t see most of the code. You’ll notice very soon that you read way more code than you write. So, again, optimize your code for easy reading, not for easy writing.