Coding Best Practices Simplified - Brief and Effective

Over the years, I have reviewed various coding best practices documents written by different development teams, as well as standards scattered across the web. Major tech companies have also published their own coding standards and best practices. Additionally, I have compiled and published my own coding and best practices using the content fron these diverse sources.

I often noticed that developers seldom read these standards, or they would review them when joining a company and then forget about them due to their length and verbosity.

To address this, I decided to condense these standards into one-liners so developers can easily remember them and refer to them during code reviews. If they need more detailed information, they can always dive into the comprehensive versions.

1. Functionality

Code meets all requirements.

2. Performance

Identify and address slow sections, code performs under increased load.

3. Reliability

Handles unexpected inputs gracefully, retries for critical operation.

4. Security

Sanitize all user inputs, ensure proper access controls, secure sensitive data.

5. Error Handling and Logging

Graceful handling of errors.

6. Testing Coverage and Quality of Tests

Adequate unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

7. Documentation

Explain complex code, summarize architecture and interactions.

8. Code Structure, Readability, and Maintainability

Ensure modular, readable, and DRY code; avoid complexity, hardcoding, and clutter.

9. Coding Standards

Follow language conventions, use existing code as guide if it is well written.