Writing clean and maintainable code is essential to the maintenance of every software ever created.

As developers, it’s necessary to develop good habits that enhances our ability to write clean and maintainable code. Obtaining this skill is crucial because not writing clean and maintainable code eventually leads to the project being abandoned, resulting in wasted time and effort.

So here are five practices/habits we can develop to help us write clean and maintainable code on our next project.

MAKE YOUR FUNCTIONS DO ONLY ONE THING

Obey the rule of single responsibility: To write clean and maintainable code our functions must be written to perform only one task.

Functions are very useful counterparts in programming. Functions can be written to do all sorts of things within our application. However, we sometimes over complicate things by writing functions that perform too many task at once.

Assign a single purpose to each function you write.

Obeying this rule also helps with debugging down the line when things go south.

USE AN APPROPRIATE FOLDER STRUCTURE

Using an appropriate folder structure: writing code that can easily be navigated is a major part of writing maintainable code. There are numerous ways we can structure our projects. Some folder structures are more suitable for large applications and others are not.

So depending on the size of our project, we need to make the right decision on what folder structure we should use.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what folder structure you should use at the start of a project. One thing I find helpful and useful is to rearrange files and folders as they get bigger and larger.

Here is a video from PedroTech to help you with various folder structures for your next project.

Visit GitHub repositories to see how code is structured

DON’T REPEAT YOURSELF

Don’t repeat yourself: one simple thing to avoid to instantly make your front end code clean and maintainable is to avoid repeating yourself. Sometimes when building an application you may have to repeatedly take an action or implement certain logic. When you notice such patterns you should do one of the following depending on what’s suitable:

1. extract the UI into a component.

2. create a custom hook.

By doing this it makes our code easier to debug and maintain in the future.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Keep it simple: it’s very common to see developers over complicate their code. Don’t use complicated and advance techniques for tasks that require a simpler technique.

Keeping it simple also means using the right technique to perform the job.

keeping it simple simply means keep it simple!

ADDING COMMENTS & DOCUMENTATIONS

Commenting your code & adding documentation: another part of writing clean and maintainable code is writing code that has comments. It’s important for us developers to learn how to add useful comments to our code.

Adding comments makes it easier for us to get back to our code at a later time to continue working on it.

Starting out, I abandoned a number of personal projects. The code was messy and I didn't have the slightest idea of what I was trying to do. Later on, I learnt to add comments as I code.

Also, adding comments allows other developers to understand what we are trying to do in our code.

Finally, if you need to learn how to use comments in your code checkout this article: Comments in JavaScript.

CONCLUSION

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