I didn’t make any progress for weeks at a time-it was very frustrating. My code had thousands of lines of code and bugs were popping up frequently. If you’ve ever written a distributed application where two processes that reside on different computers interact with each other via messages, you know that the complexity can quickly become overwhelming. The system allowed you to run graph algorithms such as computing the shortest path on a large map in a distributed environment to speed up computation among multiple machines. One of my research projects during my time as a doctoral researcher in distributed systems was to code a distributed graph processing system from scratch.

Story: I learned to focus on writing clean code the hard way. The Python-based The Art of Clean Coding is suitable for programmers at any level, with ideas presented in a language-agnostic manner. Tie your new skills together into one unifying principle: Focus.Design efficient user interfaces with the Less is More principle.Apply the Do One Thing Well philosophy to vastly improve functionality.Balance your goals, capacity, and feedback to achieve the productive state of Flow.Avoid premature optimization that risks over-complicating code.Write code cleanly and simply to eliminate clutter.Avoid coding in isolation: create a minimum viable product to get early feedback.Concentrate on the important stuff with the 80/20 principle - focus on the 20% of your code that matters most.

The book’s guiding principle is simplicity: reduce and simplify, then reinvest energy in the important parts to save you countless hours and ease the often onerous task of code maintenance. The eight core principles in The Art of Clean Coding will teach you how to write clear, maintainable code without compromising functionality. Most software developers waste thousands of hours working with overly complex code.

Writing clean code