Hey everyone!
Just wanted to update that launching an app was a success! It was hard work from the start, but everything went smoothly as the time kept going on!
This is with the same company I’m still working at. I’ll have to say that everybody (the company plus the team I am in) put in their best efforts to make it all happen. It’s not live to the public yet, but when it will be then I’ll put a link under one of my future posts. It wasn’t like this along with just a business, but as I’ve been working here, everybody was basically a family. That was probably what made everything more comfortable.
Anyway, although our CTO didn’t exactly mind too much about coding style, I had adapted to these standards that helped a lot with bugs:
Though I didn’t like the old code I had to work with, I still did my best keeping at it and using it, just because it was still working.
While adding newer portions into the app, I started to incorporate the standard style of what Android wants.
Simplify/reuse/do as less in code as possible (meaning don’t rewrite code in other places) and just let what you’ve written before work for you whether it will be now or the future.
Remove anything unnecessary and refactor as much as possible, especially when an opportunity can be seen to do it!
Go out for breaks if necessary to feel refreshed as you come back into the office.
Do what’s only necessary for the code reviews!
Let’s get to the why the above needs to be done:
First, of course there will be legacy code hanging around (unless you’re one of the lucky guys out there who has started the project). However, don’t let you being first get into your head and make sure it is simple enough.
Secondly, you should try and think for the other developers who need to work along with your code. If they don’t understand something and will have to ask you all the time, that will be super not-productive for you to work on something else. That goes along with being simple enough.
Third, also going along with being simple enough, if you’ll have to come back to a feature in the next 4 months, chances are you’re not going to remember all of the details (who does if they’re working on multiple tasks?). There may be geniuses out there who can do that, but training yourself to do so is probably not worth it due to healthy-lifestyle reasons.
Fourth, you know that you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot when you find something that just doesn’t seem right (or if somebody else does and then points it out to you – however if you’re learning from that then that’s good!)
Fifth, it’ll be less-likelier to introduce bugs if the code is just simple.
Just remember that it’s not hard to program. Rather, solving the problem through programming is the challenge.
Until next time.
Brian.