Good Coding Practices

I’m fresh to the industry, but I know a thing or two about good coding practices. And one of them saved my sanity today.

I’m learning Qt, as it is something they don’t deign to teach you in school. Moreover, I didn’t even know a tool like this existed until I entered this company. Something that converts UI development into drag-and-drop? Sign me up!

I like UI development. But sometimes you really just want things to be pre-made for you. Like trees and tabs and radio buttons.

In this thing I’m working on, I had to find a way to convert this Tree Widget to go from single-select to multi-select. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the stupid function call I needed.

Eventually, I gave up and guessed.

And I guessed right.

How could I possibly guess right? Consistent naming conventions. It’s something so simple, so basic, but so often ignored. I can’t tell you the nightmares I’ve gone through in the month-and-a-half I’ve been on this team with code that is inconsistent in how things are done, not just across various components, but even internally, within small sub-divisions of the application.

Naming conventions. Learn them. Use them. Enforce them.