A blog about design, code and some other stuff

This post is about a very simple thing that I’ve been doing since I started to code (by coincidence) and that I feel that increases a lot the readability and organization of my code. Some people may not agree with it but for me it makes total sense and was also documented by some experienced developers like Uncle Bob on his great book Clean Code. I tend to think that a single approach may not be the best one for everybody - since every person thinks on a different way - but I’m pretty confident that this advise will be good to a lot of people and that it will increase the overall quality of the code.

The rule is simple, split larger functions/classes into smaller specialized ones, period. It will not only increase the readability but it will also make the code more reusable since it will be easier to override the default behavior if needed (especially if extending a class or reusing a 3rd party lib). I will try to explain how and give a basic example.

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When I released JS-Signals I decided to create a document explaining the difference between different kinds of Observers and the possible pros and cons of each pattern, and as you can see on the document every approach has its pros/cons and depending on the scenario the recommended approach might change.

Before coding JS-Signals I was using a very basic EventEmitter “class” that could be used to listen/dispatch arbitrary events but ever since I released JS-Signals I almost didn’t used arbitrary events anymore (because of the benefits of using a Signal), but a couple weeks ago I had to propagate changes on my model classes to the UI and the changes are coming from many different inputs, so the easiest way to keep everything in sync was to dispatch events every time my model objects updated with a new value. In that case it is way easier to use a string ID for the event type than to create a new Signal object manually for each value, since the project was already using Signals everywhere I decided to code a simple EventEmitter that would use JS-Signals internal mechanism (so I could use the advanced features if needed) but still allow arbitrary event types.

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(not sure if the pirate image + caption was created by Zeh Fernando, he sent it to me a couple years ago, forgot to ask him…)

Another polemic subject and something that I’ve been delaying for a while, I’ll try to explain how I got to my conclusions and I’m sure a lot of people won’t agree until they experience the same problem or realize how often it may happen on a real project and specially if it does happen with a code you don’t “own” and/or can’t change without compromising future updates… The advice is mostly about JavaScript (since it’s what I’ve been coding more lately and where I think the issue is bigger) but it also fits other languages.

Not so long ago I had an opposite opinion about this subject - I would always set everything to private and only changed to protected/public if needed - try to understand what made me change my opinion and pay attention every time you find yourself “tied” or doing lots of hacks just because you can’t monkey-patch a simple function/variable.

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Last week I released a new version of js-signals, I usually avoid creating posts at each release since I think people can simply watch the project on Github or are already following me on twitter (and I always send a twit after each release) but I added a few “advanced” features that may be useful on specific cases, that’s why I decided to create a post about it, I think some explanation may help people identify good use cases for those features.

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This post is very polemic, I thought a lot before publishing it, please try to be open-minded and read the whole thing before commenting, it is not supposed to become a flame war. Please read the about page to understand the objective of this blog and the way I think about it.

I’ve been considering to use a CSS pre-processor like SASS, LESS, Stylus, etc, for a very long time. Every time someone asked me if I was using any of these tools/languages I would say that I’m kinda used to my current workflow and I don’t really see a reason for changing it since the problems those languages solves are not really the problems I’m having with CSS. Then yesterday I read two blog posts which made me reconsider my point of view so I decided to spend some time today studying the alternatives (once again) and porting some code to check the output and if the languages would really help to keep my code more organized/maintainable and/or if it would make the development process easier (also if they evolved on the past few years).

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