Key Principles

This page sets out our key principles for developers working on code throughout the digital land project.

There are almost an endless amount of principles online but as a team we have highlighted key principles that are relevant to our project right now. Your are welcome to challenge these so that we can improve as a team!

Don’t Write Code…

…until you have to (write new code only when everything else fails) is the single most important lesson every developer needs to learn. The amount of duplicate, crappy code (across projects) that exists today is overwhelming. In a lot of cases developers don’t even bother to look around. They just want to write code.

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Do Write tests.

Every programmer knows they should write tests for their code. Few do. The universal response to “Why not?” is “I’m in too much of a hurry.” This quickly becomes a vicious cycle- the more pressure you feel, the fewer tests you write. The fewer tests you write, the less productive you are and the less stable your code becomes. The less productive and accurate you are, the more pressure you feel. Programmers burn out from just such cycles. Breaking out requires an outside influence. We found the outside influence we needed in a simple testing framework that lets us do a little testing that makes a big difference.