I want to write code that is easy to read, easy to understand what is it does, and easy to integrate into a larger application. That’s what I want to be known for in my career, and that’s the legacy I want to leave for the companies I work for. Even better if I can also pass that skill on to my teammates.

There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done though. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to articulate the idea.

It’s kind of like with UI: well designed interfaces are barely noticeable because they “just work.”

But when code isn’t designed well it is easy to tear it apart. Even if a piece of code does its job you still have to spend hours and come up with hacks integrating it into your system if the developer has a poor understanding of how it’s supposed to fit in.

I tried discussing this topic with someone at a networking event years ago, but she thought I was trying to describe frontend development. I’m not talking about how to code a UI, I’m saying that the code itself should be treated as a user interface. Obviously I did a bad job describing these principles.

But I know something is in there. At my previous job we had an engineer work on our team for a couple of months and he commented that the code I wrote at the time was easier to work with than code I wrote a year prior. What needs to be figured out now is what elegantly written code entails, and changes need to be made so that developers produce such results.