Your Code as a Crime Scene

Learn Why Attractiveness Matters

Think about your daily work and the kinds of changes you make to your programs. Truth be told, how often do you get something wrong because your conceptual model of what the code does didn’t match up with the program’s real behavior? Perhaps that query method you called had a side effect that you rightfully didn’t expect. Or perhaps there’s a feature that breaks sporadically due to an unknown timing bug, particularly when it’s the full moon and, of course, just before that critical deadline.

Programming is hard enough without having to guess a program’s intent. As we get experience with a codebase, we build a mental model of how it works. When that code then fails to meet our expectations, bad things are bound ...