Web developer: be a team player
To begin this series of developer tips, I wanted to talk
about what I consider the # 1 rule: to be a team player.
If you are an independent professional web developer working on your own
or are part of a development team in an agency, it is important to remember
that at some point, someone else will end up interacting with your code. When
they do, you do not want to be the only one they start complaining about. Not
only that, but "your future" will be very disappointed if they go
back to a previous project and have to deal with a disaster.
When you're coding, whether it's a website, an application
or a piece of software, there's one simple thing you can do to make your code
readable, accessible and friendly to other developers, an easy thing to be a
team player: Bleeding.
Sangria is vital, regardless of the language in which you
are writing or the nature of what you are creating. In some languages it is
even a requirement.
The code with and without indents will work and neither will
cause errors in the document. However, imagine that this code is a small part
of a document that has hundreds or thousands of lines, that you have never seen
before and that you now need to edit. Which one would you prefer to work with?
There really is no excuse not to bleed your code, most
modern editors do it for you! You do not need to be a superstar developer or a
front-end ninja, you just have to be a team player.
