8 thoughts on “Good naming is a process, not a single step”

  1. Oh man, this is just what I was looking for. What you describe as “indebted code” is something that I've unintentionally add in a lot of places throughout my project. Junior devs (such as myself) have a lot of trouble with this.

    Not only do they not notice it, but they aren't even aware of how much naming is important. Academic literature and self-learning course never put any emphasis on this and it is something devs become aware of only by going through painful, old projects or by learning it from a mentor / senior developer.

    1. I'm glad you are finding it useful. Awareness of technical debt and how to work with it is the difference between CS (the study of software) and software engineering (actually doing software creation). Very few courses provide any opportunities to learn software engineering, yet it is the only one which is useful in industry.

    1. There are some in later steps of the sequence.

      This is describing a process rather than a result, so I find examples trivial to present in person and impossible to write about. I might do a video-blog series on this at some point, as that would let me show the transformations.

  2. I love that you repeat that reading code is the thing we spend most of our time doing.

    My colleague Jonathan Boccara wrote a book called "The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox" (https://leanpub.com/legacycode) It contains 10 techniques to improve our legacy code reading skills.

    Thanks for this post.

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