Please log in to watch this conference skillscast.

Developers can get better at their craft by learning from the great writers who mastered theirs. Writing software isn’t the same as writing a novel, but there are parallels. Besides, advice from writers is better because writers have been struggling with their craft for many centuries, not just a few decades. It’s better-written as well. During this talk, you will discover great writers’ best advice for coders: Stephen King on refactoring, Anne Rice on development hardware, Hemingway on modelling with personas, and Neil Gaiman on everything.

You will explore the similarities between writing and coding, and uses writers’ advice to identify different kinds of avoidable bad naming in code. Some class, method, and variable names are so bad that they’re funny, but you’ve still seen them in production code. The second part of the session explores practical techniques for working on better naming, including renaming things. Renaming is even harder because it includes naming things plus other hard things. The final section goes back to writing. The next step after finding better names in code is to write better comments in code, which is almost as hard as naming is.

The surprising thing about naming things well in code is not that it’s hard, but how easy it is to accept bad names. This is a hard problem that’s worth working on, because although you can’t make the naming problem go away, you can learn to write much better code regardless of which technologies you use.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

• How to write maintainable Scala code - Beginner (SkillsCast recorded in December 2016)
• Lightbend Akka for Scala - Professional (in London on 11th - 12th November 2019)
• Uncle Bob Martin's Clean Code Workshop on Agile Software Craftsmanship (in London on 2nd - 3rd December 2019)
• Scala eXchange London 2019 (in London on 12th - 13th December 2019)
• Scalax2gether Community Day 2019 (in London on 14th December 2019)
• Code Kata: Yilin Wei - Optics with Monocle (in London on 22nd October 2019)
• Solandra Hands-On Tutorial & Emergent Behaviour In Insects (in London on 28th October 2019)
• Abstract Data Types In The Region Of Abysmal Pain, And How To Navigate Them (SkillsCast recorded in September 2019)
• The Last Frontier and Beyond (SkillsCast recorded in August 2019)