Refactoring
Hello and welcome to the last post of my blog. I’ve really enjoyed writing these throughout the semester since it helped me learn more about computer science and programming in general. For this last week, I will talk about refactoring. It is one of the most important concepts to grasp in programming because it can greatly improve your code over time. Refactoring is a way of rewriting and improving code without changing the functionality of the original code. Your code may be hard to look at or understand by other programmers so you may want to refactor it to make it easier to read and understand.
Your code should be clean so you don’t end up having technical debt later on. Rushing your coding to meet deadlines will pretty much guarantee messy code and you should start refactoring early on so that the messy code does not keep piling up. When messy code keeps piling up, it becomes more of a burden to refactor and the programmer may become more unmotivated to fix it. When you refactor code, you want to make sure all your variable and method names make sense and provide some context. For example, the variable name “x” does not provide any information about what information it stores or what it is used in. Instead, your variable name should be more specific, like “accountNumber.” Having more specific variable names also helps other programmers identify what your code does exactly.
You want to start looking at refactoring at specific times during your coding process. Refactoring Guru talks about the “Rule of Three” which means when you have to code the same thing for the third time you should consider refactoring. Also consider beginning to refactor when you add a new feature because someone else’s code might be too messy to read and you need to refactor to clean it up. That also makes it easier to implement additional features later down the line. You should also consider refactoring close to the deadline of your project since it will be the last chance to make changes to the code. Your project will become open to the public and you do not want other people to see your messy code.
When you refactor, the code should become cleaner and still maintain its functionality. Sometimes you may have to completely rewrite some parts of your code in order to do this. Other times it may just be as simple as adding some spacing or renaming a variable. All your tests should still pass after refactoring. If a test fails, you messed up somewhere and made an error.
In the past, I have done some refactoring myself and I hope to continue to practice refactoring to keep my code clean, easy to understand, and easy to manage.
https://refactoring.guru/refactoring
Your code should be clean so you don’t end up having technical debt later on. Rushing your coding to meet deadlines will pretty much guarantee messy code and you should start refactoring early on so that the messy code does not keep piling up. When messy code keeps piling up, it becomes more of a burden to refactor and the programmer may become more unmotivated to fix it. When you refactor code, you want to make sure all your variable and method names make sense and provide some context. For example, the variable name “x” does not provide any information about what information it stores or what it is used in. Instead, your variable name should be more specific, like “accountNumber.” Having more specific variable names also helps other programmers identify what your code does exactly.
You want to start looking at refactoring at specific times during your coding process. Refactoring Guru talks about the “Rule of Three” which means when you have to code the same thing for the third time you should consider refactoring. Also consider beginning to refactor when you add a new feature because someone else’s code might be too messy to read and you need to refactor to clean it up. That also makes it easier to implement additional features later down the line. You should also consider refactoring close to the deadline of your project since it will be the last chance to make changes to the code. Your project will become open to the public and you do not want other people to see your messy code.
When you refactor, the code should become cleaner and still maintain its functionality. Sometimes you may have to completely rewrite some parts of your code in order to do this. Other times it may just be as simple as adding some spacing or renaming a variable. All your tests should still pass after refactoring. If a test fails, you messed up somewhere and made an error.
In the past, I have done some refactoring myself and I hope to continue to practice refactoring to keep my code clean, easy to understand, and easy to manage.
https://refactoring.guru/refactoring
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