Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design
📅 Finished on: 2024-09-26
Tidy First is a state of mind. Always think about how to clean up code.
Highly recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer blog.
Nice little book, nothing special. It provides some clean code examples, which I have already seen presented better in Clean Code.
The interesting takeaways are that “tidy first” is a state of mind: always assume your code will be read more than written, and assume code is not static; it will always need restructuring. Approach things with continuous tidying, and you will progress as a serious professional. Of course, if you have emergencies, those take priority, but your job is to avoid coupling and spaghetti code so future work is simpler. Technical debt is what stalls companies.
The rest is well-known best practices. I appreciated the ideas about comments, and about wrapping things in a function when you see them used in multiple places. Lighter than Clean Code for a junior.