Keeping things consistent can be hard enough in everyday tasks as it is, never mind with a bunch of developers who like to do things in their own preferred way. All developers code differently, from indentation preferences to what type of equation they use to find an answer, and no one way is wrong (except for when it actually is So, when you work with a group of developers, it’s always good if the developers work towards the same style of coding.
The main issue for developers who don’t have consistent code is working out where code has been placed to be able to modify it. Projects can have thousands and thousands of lines of code and when a developer is trying to bug fix another developer’s work, it can take a long time to find the root of the problem. This can make developing on another developer’s code frustrating and time consuming.
When developers use the same style of coding it makes it easier to read quickly, work out what a previous developer had done and quickly debug and issue if it arises.
Also, if you’re consistently working with a group of developers it helps if multiple people can work on a single project allowing for the project to be quickly picked up if the original develop is on holiday or sick.
At Ascensor, we have various methods of keeping our code consistent:
Baseplate
We have a baseplate that we all start from. This means that we can ensure that all the basic code that every site needs is present from the very beginning of the project, also helping us save time.
GIT
We use git which is a version control system. This allows us to pull projects from a repository so we all have access to each other’s projects.
Sharing knowledge & Helping one another
As developers, it’s important that we are keeping up with the latest technologies and always learning how to improve our own skills. But also letting our team know about what we’ve learned or sharing links to learning materials, helping us growing as a connected team.
We work closely with each other to support one another. If a developer requires assistance, we make time as a team to work out the problem.
There are multiple benefits to our clients for keeping code consistent, such as:
- Multiple people can work on a client’s project regardless of whether they built the site. So, if someone is sick another developer can work on a project to meet deadlines
- When building a brand-new site, the likelihood that another developer has done something similar before means that a feature within a website could be built on the foundations of another feature meaning planning and testing has been done before and that we have a good idea of how a feature should work making the development of the new feature smoother and more reliable.
- The ability to reuse base features from other projects makes website development faster as the base feature should work regardless of the design changes made to it.
So, like most things in life, consistency is important to keep things running fast and smoothly and Ascensor client’s benefit from our quality control procedures including maintaining a consistent code base, meaning we can work faster in the delivery of stable projects!