We have a lofty goal: programming style as documentation. Inspired by Steve McConnel’s “Code Complete”, Uncle Bob’s “Clean Code” and Andrew Hunt’s “The Pragmatic Programmer”, this session reviews best practices for writing code in a style that’s easy to create, maintain and understand. We’ll discuss concrete methods to get you there and give you a vocabulary for pragmatically evaluating code quality.
 
Various refactoring techniques, code smells, anti-patterns, and rules of thumb will be discussed, including fail fast, return early, separation of concerns, arrow code, magic numbers, the boy scout rule, being “stringly typed,” DRY, the step-down rule, table-driven methods, the importance of staying native, techniques for finding subtle redundancy, reinventing the square wheel, when to create a process, horizontal and vertical density, and simple design patterns. Within this session, we will refactor a confusing and ugly chunk of code into something beautiful, easy to read, and maintain. While examples are in C#, coders in any language should be able to follow along and apply the principles discussed. Though it seems like a lot, these topics will help developers rethink their approach to code.