Coding Guidelines

• Every design choice should yield the most simplistic design possible for the need of users at the current time. No guesses for future functionality were designed into the application.
• There is zero custom code that duplicates functionality of a built-in function in the framework
• Every fixed defect on a deployed product has tests added to prevent regression.
• All tests pass before code is merged into a shared repository.
• All model and variable names are both immediately obvious (to a new developer) and as short as possible without using abbreviations
• Only one or two instance variables are shared between each controller and view
• Code has been aggressively DRYed during development.
• No .find or similar methods are called in a view or view helper
• Methods must not be longer than 10 lines of code. Shouldn’t be more than 5 lines of code
• Try to avoid if and never use nested if/unless. Think of unless as in “return unless goon?” nested code gets more unreadable
• Never use Copy&Paste
• Always read what you’ve written and rethink it
• Always ask: “Does it feel right?” “Do I understand this 6 months from now?”
• A method must always return the same kind of object
• When using a method allways ask what that method returns and use appropriately.
• When writing documentation or any kind of comments always write about “WHY?” (not about “how?”)
• If you do anything twice think about how you can prevent that but stay pragmatic!
• Read the logs! What SQLs do you fire? Use newrelic in development mode and analyze your requests
• If you’re not using form_for for updating your models, you’re probably doing it wrong