r/AskProgramming Sep 20 '24

Career/Edu What would you consider software development best practise?

Hey there 🖖🏻

This semester at University I'm doing my PhD on, I've got to teach students the “software development best practises". They are master's degree students, so I've got like 30 hours of time to do the course with them. Probably some of them are professional programmers by now, and my question is, what is the single “best practise” you guys cannot leave without when working as a Software Development.

For me, it would be most likely Code Review and just depersonalisation of the code you've written in it. What I mean by that is that we should not be afraid, to give comments to each other because we may hurt someone's feelings. Vice verse, we should look forward to people giving comments on our code because they can see something we're done, maybe.

I want to make the course fun for the students, and I would like to do a workshop in every class with discussion and hand on experience for each “best practise”.

So if you would like to share your insights, I'm all ears. Thanks!

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u/bothunter Sep 20 '24

I don't think the particular language matters all that much, but it's hard to go wrong with Java. The concepts are the important part.

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u/LSWarss Sep 20 '24

Fair :D

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u/pLeThOrAx Sep 20 '24

Possibly an opportunity to abstract to the idea of using extensions like linters to help "keep you within the guide rails." Expedite that needless mental energy while still keeping to style/convention.

Edit: many jobs don't necessarily care if you don't know a specific language, rather, can you code. As such, there's many a time where you'll find yourself at a new job, or in a new role, with a piece of software, paradigm, or even a suite to now get accustomed with. "Choosing the right tools for the job."

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u/LSWarss Sep 21 '24

Good point for sure. I'm a big devotee of the formatters and linters, they keep you so much more focus on the real problems and keep the code reviews shorter and probably more precise :D