Learn from My Coding Mistakes

[Andy]

Don't make the same mistakes I made when coding websites in the past.

One thing I recently realized was that when (in the past) I coded scripts for my own needs, the scripts were difficult to port to new uses or share with other people.

The thing is, when a coder needs code for their needs (CSS, PHP, Javascript or whatever), they quickly bash out a solution that works but is incomprehensible to others and cannot be easily used by anyone else because it has no documentation and minimal comments in the code.

What I found is that I could not even re-use my own code in many cases since like most coders, a few weeks or months after you wrote some code, what you clearly understood at the time of coding becomes a complete mystery when you re-visit the code for a new project.

But, it gets worse! You forget how to access the output of these scripts such as your visitor tracking script.

I posted more on this topic here: www.excelorize.com/leveraging-your-coding - Leveraging Your Coding

[timeassasin]

Thank you for posting this. It helped me a lot.

[jbladeus]

I used to have similar problems, but now i make it a point to add comments to each and every piece of code i write which helps me a lot.

[Andy]

If you sell your scripts, you may want to do the opposite and strip out all comments, white space and even obfuscate the code.