Last week I gave a presentation titled “Clean functions” to my Wikidata colleagues. As the title suggests, this presentation is all about how to create clean functions that are easy to understand and modify.
Why did I go with this particular design topic rather then one of the dozens of other ones I could have talked about? And why a talk on functions – everyone know how to write functions no?
During the last few weeks I’ve been paying attention to the complexity of code arising from violating very simple function design guidelines. During code review, I encountered many such occurrences, essentially all of them for no good reason whatsoever. That is really a pity, as this complexity ends up being costly in many ways. It slows down development considerably and increases the likelihood of defects. All while this can easily be avoided by following simple rules. Hence this presentation goes over the rules and the problems they prevent.
A lot of the material in the presentation is based on works by Robert C. Martin (yes I know, I’m such a fanboy), in particular his book Clean Code and an episode from his Clean Coders video series.
Since the slides of my presentation are not designed for standalone use, they are only suitable for giving you a quick idea on what the presentation is about. I can however recommend the Clean Code III: Functions talk by …, well, you can guess that.
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