Building a Solid Foundation

12 Feb 2025

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Building a solid foundation, with coding standards!

When you think about building a house, the first step that comes to mind is constructing a strong foundation, without it, the house can easily fall apart. The same thing applies to coding. Before you can write good code, it’s essential to lay down the foundation, to know and follow coding standards. These standards help provide a structure that will keep your code organized and easy to understand. Without them coding gets messy and confusing a lot faster than you would think and you might end up wasting time trying to figure out what your code is doing.

Beauty (coding standards) in the eye of the beholder

Coding standards are not just about the little details like how many spaces to use for indentation or where to put curly braces. They’re about creating good coding habits that aid in learning programming languages. It is a lot easier to learn a language when you see it through a structural perspective with uniform formatting. For example, when I started using ESLint with VSCode, I saw a lot of little pesky errors that I needed to fix. At first, it felt very trivial and maybe even frustrating having to address every single warning, but as I kept working through them, I began to understand why these rules were important. Following these guidelines made my code cleaner and more uniform, and over time, I spent less time debugging and more time focusing on the logic behind my code.

In the end, coding standards are not just rules to follow designed to annoy you—they’re tools to help you learn and grow as a programmer. By sticking to these standards, you build a strong foundation for your code that will support your learning and make your projects more successful. Tools like ESLint make sure you’re following these standards, helping you become a better coder. Even though it can feel tough at first, the effort is worth it because it makes writing and understanding code much easier in the long run.