| I would say a developer who writes good code is one who: 1.) Uses comments & documentation as a last resort. 2.) Tailors the complexity of their code to the intended audience. There's nothing inherently wrong with 'being cute' or utilising the full feature set of a language if this will make future developers' lives easier. Conversely, if the project is to be maintained by someone that is fresh out of college, KISS is best. 3.) Prefers tried-and-true over bleeding-edge for production-level projects (it's called bleeding edge for a reason, 9/10 times you'll bleed). 4.) Produces code that conforms to what-is rather than what-should-be. Blindly sticking to ideology will perhaps produce more 'beautiful', but not necessarily more maintainable, code. 5.) Is aware of the expected lifetime of the project. No need for defensive programming if this is an MVP that you know will be scrapped in six months time. If this is the backbone of a major banking system then extra checks and being paranoid makes sense. 6.) Follows the conventions of the project and ecosystem. Consistent code is more important than personal style. 7.) Perhaps I'm in the minority here but: is not over-reliant on IDEs. Tools like IntelliSense encourage you to offload part of your mental model to a program; I feel like this inhibits your reasoning abilities. |