PHPSW: Code Quality, March 2018
14 Mar 2018 at Brightpearl

14

This prototype works, but it's not pretty, and now it's in production. That legacy application really needs some TLC. Where do we start? When creating long lived applications, it's imperative to focus on good practices. The solution is to improve the whole development life cycle; from planning, better coding and testing, to automation, peer review and more. In this talk, we'll take a quick look into each of these areas, looking at how we can make positive, actionable change in our workflow.

A large part of being a programmer is making choices, whether it's what framework to use, what libraries to use or just how to structure code. Every day when we're programming we try to take choices that are good, and avoid choices that are bad. But what if actually we're all terrible at telling the difference between good and bad? What if we're all just not very good at a fundamental skill needed to do our jobs? In this talk I'm going to try to demonstrate a couple of common epistemological mistakes that people make, how you can try to analyze what is good and what is bad a bit better, and how to limit the consequences that come inevitably when bad choices are made.