Reasons and Ways to Improve Code Quality – Venkat Subramaniam

Improve code quality by writing clear solutions, reducing complexity, and prioritizing maintainability through automated testing, strategic code reviews, and technical debt management.

Key takeaways
  • Focus on writing functions with instructions at the same level of detail to improve code quality.
  • Quality of code is inversely proportional to the effort it takes to understand it.
  • Instead of writing a clever solution, focus on writing a clear solution that solves the problem.
  • Good code is about empathy and humanity, not just technical complexity.
  • Write tests before reviewing code and fix bugs when found.
  • Look for relevance in code and avoid unnecessary complexity.
  • Focus on extensibility and optimize for reading rather than writing code.
  • Reduce dependencies as much as possible to improve code quality.
  • Write automated tests to improve design quality and catch bugs early.
  • Pay technical debt by listing and prioritizing issues, then scheduling time to fix them.
  • Quality code is measurable by how well it can respond to changes and questions.
  • Documentation should be self-documenting and explain why code is designed a certain way.
  • Code reviews should be tactical and involve reviews by multiple team members.
  • Improve code quality by focusing on creating clear solutions rather than clever ones.
  • Include automated tests as part of code reviews.
  • Prioritize maintaining simple and minimalistic code as much as possible.