Isn’t this a perfect screenshot?… Umm… I’ll take your vote as yes.

Being a developer or any other professional, it’s important to make things happen. What’s more important is to make those things happen the right way. When I started out on WordPress, I didn’t care about how good the code is. Back then I focused more on my delivery and shipping things faster. It was when I had to go through a legacy code, I realized the importance of writing quality code.

I aimed to follow standards and write cleaner code. I came to know about WordPress Coding Standards. Wow! They have defined a complete guideline on how to write code. And the best thing was, they had a documentation of integrating that ruleset with my favorite text editor. PHPCS with Sublime Linter rocked! The documentation said you just have to hit save on a file and all the errors who doesn’t fall with the selected coding standard will show up. So I went ahead, made some changes in existing file and hit save. Woah! Infinite errors popped up!

Some errors were straightforward and easy to fix:

While some errors were jargons to me. I had to research to understand what they meant:

The best part was, the first kind of errors told me to make my code cleaner and more readable while the second kind made me follow best practices and write secure code.

This was a small area of my work but undoubtedly the most important one. And one of the best achievements I ever had was choosing this right tool. Sometimes I just fix these kinds of errors in previously written code when I’m bored. Gives me a feeling that I am fixing something, utilizing my time by making it clean and safe.

A month ago, I came across a tweet. It’ll stay in my head forever. Merry Christmas!

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler

— Quincy Larson (@ossia) November 15, 2017