This talk is about general best practices and guidelines for writing well-structured, maintainable code.

We rarely write code that we never have to revisit again - in fact, we often spend more time maintaining existing code than writing new code. So - it makes sense to make our code easy to maintain, doesn't it?

In this talk, we'll look at ways to write maintainable code - including SOLID Principles, good naming conventions and other clean coding practices. We'll also touch on architectural thinking, configuration management, and testing. And of course, we'll look at lots of code.

Lastly, we'll discuss the importance of being pragmatic and considering YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it) - code should be easy to maintain, but it doesn't have to cater for every possible scenario that will (likely) never happen.

The suggestions in this talk will focus on object-oriented languages such as Java and C#. I teach a Udemy course on SOLID Principles, and I like to take a practical approach - instead of just talking through theory, I like to show code and highlight potential issues and how to fix them.

I've read numerous books that I can draw on to provide further insight and context to the audience, including The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, and Clean Code by Robert Martin.