Broken Windows
And why whitespace matters
Happy New Year!
I hope you had a relaxing Christmas and are looking forward to an engaging and fulfilling new year.
Today at a Glance
Broken Windows
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Broken Windows
Introduction
I think all of us would say we take pride in our work if asked. Yet I see pull request after pull request with small things like bad indenting or not matching the existing coding style.
The code may work but the pull request gets rejected. I often wonder if the engineer thinks these things don’t matter. Sometimes I wonder if I should just let things go.
If we take pride in our work, why do some people miss the small things? Is it ‘whitespace blindness’ as I call it, or is it a bigger problem?
Why it matters
The reason I continue calling out small failings in pull requests is because of the broken window theory. Simply put:
“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”
To put it in software terms, it’s small failings that start an ever-increasing decline in quality. If you have worked on a once-pristine code base that is now a mess, you’ve seen this happen.
How to apply it
Holding people accountable for small failures lets everyone know that standards are important. If we can’t nail the small things, maybe we should be concerned about quality as a whole.
The great thing about a project that maintains good standards is it’s self-documenting too. So new engineers should know what style and design they should adopt for consistency.
So if we take pride in our work, take pride in the small things too. They just might be as important as the big things.
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How an Ugly Single-Page Website Makes $5,000 a Month with Affiliate Marketing - Something from my Medium reading list that might inspire a side-project!
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