The Easiest Way to Create A Solution That Works

The easiest way to create a solution that works…is to do it right the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but it turns out to be an important factor to keep in mind when you are tempted to come up with a quick and dirty solution for a problem that does not follow established best practices and is likely to have code quality issues later.

I have run across many sections of code that I or other developers have written in the past that we thought were “good enough” at the time it was written, yet, I was revisiting the code because we discovered a bug in it. Many times, this code had an issue that would have been trivial to fix at the time it was written, if it were only found. It seems that as a developer, we tend to find the least sufficient solution that will solve the immediate problem we are experiencing instead of finding an optimal solution that will be easily maintained months and years after it was written.

As a result of having to go back and fix so many trivial errors throughout the codebase, I am working towards being more diligent when it comes to ensuring my code meets all code quality and style guidelines. In addition, for code reviews, I look for a way to gently point out stylistic and code quality issues that don’t adhere to team standards, assisting the author with correcting the issues where necessary. My goal is to ensure that I do all I can to avoid being part of shipping more defects in code that is headed to production than defects we are fixing with the code change being shipped.

If we write great code the first time, it keeps us from having to come back and rewrite our code later.

Tags:

Related Posts

Mar 28, 2014
2 minutes

Launching a Redesign of a Website

Over the last few months, I have been working on a major redesign of an existing Magento website. One of the major goals of the redesign was to take a legacy desktop-only website and upgrade it to take full advantage of Responsive Web Design so that customers could equally utilize mobile and desktop devices to browse and purchase products.

For a site that had seen only minor updates over the last 5 years, this redesign represented a major change visually and navigationally from the previous site. Based on the history of the site, the development team was optimistic that the redesign would be well-received, but were suprised by a few things that came up in the feedback we saw.

#magento #responsive-web-design
Read More
May 23, 2014
2 minutes

Avoid SiteCatalyst's useForcedLinkTracking and target="_blank"

All sites rely upon some third party analytics software to track at the very least the number of visitors to a site. Many sites use Google Analytics, which provide much more information that just the number of visitors. Another option that some of the bigger sites use is Adobe Analytics, aka SiteCatalyst to enable more custom tracking options that are not evident through the Google Analytics interface.

One feature of SiteCatalyst is that it allows you to set an option useForcedLinkTracking that will track every link on your site for clicks whether or not you have setup custom tracking for the links or not. Effectively what the code does is create a JavaScript event handler to intercept all click events on the <a href="http://url.com">Link</a> hyperlinks. Once they are intercepted, SiteCatalyst sends its tracking information to its servers and then procedes to attempt to make sure that the link functions properly. Unfortunately, in some versions of the SiteCatalyst code, it attempts to create a synthetic click event that works in many cases. However, if you are using Safari with the popup blocker turned on, and a target="_blank" in the hyperlink, then it will trigger the popup blocker, which simply ignores the click, and the user sees nothing happen at all. In order to fix it, hopefully the latest version of the SiteCatalyst code will handle it, turn off useForcedLinkTracking, or, as the very last resort, convert the <a /> links to another type of element and use JavaScript to open the new window manually when listening for the click event on the new element. It seems this works all the time, but it will prevent SiteCatalyst from tracking those clicks.

#javascript #rant #sitecatalyst
Read More
May 14, 2014
2 minutes

Responsive Images with Picturefill 2.0

Responsive Web Design seems to be the way that the majority of websites will be developed in the near future. For a while, everyone was creating a separate website that catered to mobile devices in addition to the main website that desktop browsers were able to access. Web Developers and UX Designers quickly discovered that this was a less than ideal approach as it required maintaining two separate websites, and the mobile website tended to remove data that was visible on the desktop version of the site.

#responsive-web-design #javascript #performance
Read More