Each week over the past month, I have posted before and after code samples calling out ways to clean up code. The response has been amazing, many receiving hundred of likes. While I will continue to share these weekly clean code samples, I wanted to collect the previous ones into a single post.
Breaking up long methods
In this first tweet a developer submitted a long Laravel controller action they wanted to clean up. At a high level the controller action handled a course enrollment request. At a low level the code had two paths for enrolling the user.
The main question to ask when evaluating a long method is who is responsible for this section of code? The answer to this question will help determine if the code can be moved elsewhere. In this case, the creation of the user could be moved to the model. We could also streamline the two paths by creating a private, conditional method. This method performs the branched logic of creating the user when necessary.
The result is a much smaller method. Some may argue we've simply moved the code. Nevertheless, the intent of our original method is more concise and its component parts are easy to follow. Both improve communicates - which is the measurement of clean code.
As pointed out on Twitter, the after code did have some mistakes, such as missing parameters to createUserIfUnauthenticated
. However, these are trivial mistakes which do not change the clean up.
A before and after of a code snippet submitted earlier. Tried to highlight key areas (@steveschoger style) to ident… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…20:38 PM - 12 Oct 2017
Leveraging objects
The second tweet was a Laravel controller action submitted by a developer. At a high level the controller action handled storing image uploads. At a low level the controller did everything itself - validation, image manipulation, storage.
To clean this code, the strategy is to leverage other objects to handle all the things. A Laravel Form Request object could be used for the validation. We could adopt the Repository Pattern to introduce an object to coordinate the storage of an image.
Similar to before, the result is a smaller method. What's different in this case is leveraging existing objects available in the framework. We also applied a pattern that fit our code. Too often developers do this in reverse - fitting the code to a pattern. Letting a pattern emerge from the code is a far cleaner approach.
Another "clean up" from last week on how you can reduce long methods by introducing objects to encapsulate related… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…16:16 PM - 17 Oct 2017
Cleaning conditional code
The third tweet focused on cleaning up the conditional code that forms most of our codebase. This has been the most popular cleanup so far. Likely because the fundamental code allows it to apply to many languages.
Most of these cleanups fall under the third Writing Clean Code practice - avoid nested code. Anytime you want to clean up conditional code as yourself two questions:
- Can I return the condition directly?
- Does inverting the conditional logic improve communication?
A few ways to clean up the conditional code that forms most of your codebase. From simple to nested to spotting unn… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…14:31 PM - 26 Oct 2017
Spotting primitive obsession
The fourth tweet focuses on spotting Primitive Obsession. Our obsession with using primitive data types often results in duplication of related code. It's not the exact same code which makes it harder to spot. Over time this code leaks through the system and becomes harder and harder to cleanup.
The tips do not draw out some additional characteristics of these value objects. Almost as important as the encapsulation there provide is the fact that they are immutable. This limits state, making them relatively lightweight to add and even easier to maintain. For more detail and examples on Range
, read RangeObject by Martin Fowler.
And yes, I would absolutely refactor limit()
to utilize array filtering. This would be the next clean up:
function limit($items, Range $range)
{
return array_filter($items, function ($item) use ($range) {
return $range->includes($item);
});
}
"Primitive Obsession" can make it difficult to spot duplication of related code. You can clean up the code by intro… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…14:59 PM - 09 Nov 2017
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Latest comments (44)
Hi, great article on such a simple concept!
It seems that the
$request
argument is missing on line 7.Thanks!
You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately it's an old screenshot and I'm too lazy to redo it. :)
Thanks Jason. These tips really helped me.
Great. Check out BaseCode for even more practices.
This is a really awesome blog. I love this blog. I wanna translate it in Bangla & post in my organization website. Would you like to give me permission to translate & repost it?
Sure. Send me the link when you're done.
Can you give me your email address for opening an account of you? I will give the post Author you.
Thank you very much. I will create an account for you. Then I will send you everything. Give me your email address.
Thanks for the wonderful tips.
1) To do clean code, you must stop using php
2) Models should not implement every possible way of instanciating them
3) Transfer from one account to another without transaction? This should be in a service.
4) The basic minimum for clean code is to have tests for them. I don't see any
5) No comments?
Either your first point is a troll, either it discredits you as a good developer.
I stopped reading your reply after your first point… Clean code is not exclusive to any one language.
What's the code editor on screenshots? Vim or atom?
Atom with the default theme.
Ah, great article.
Nice tips for cleaning your code and it is readable with comment on each line.
Thanks.
IMO, it's better to mirror the use of the collection method inside Set::contains() instead of using in_array, since
items
seems to be a Collection object. You get more functionality that way and it's more Laravel-ish.I see your suggestion. However, it's important to remember an array is a collection. No need to introduce an entire framework just to use one method.
Ah, I see that the other calls are to the Set class
size
andcontains
. I misread - I thought it was calling those onitems
. My bad. You are correct.Excellent article, problem with screencaptures is the (automated?) generated cloudinary image of 880px max width; a lightbox would be great (the zoom mouse cursor tricks us to think that the image file will open in a modal window) or a link to original image would be highly appreciated instead of manual editing the link. What I did was to convert res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/im... into thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i... and similarly in every image in order to watch your nice programming standards.
Who can we contact to express these drawbacks of dev.to?
Really, the only complaint I have in this post is the screenshots are too small. I barely able to read them.
Very interesting, I'll keep on reading your posts, thanks! This is actually one of the area I want to improve these days so your posts come in handy. Just one detail: you should make your screenshot bigger, because they're really hard to read like this, even full-size.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, as commented, this is a limitation of dev.to and their image upload functionality. View the original tweets for a better resolution.
Oh I'm new to dev.to and didn't know that, sorrry for the useless comment. I'll follow up on twitter as well, thanks for the heads up!
I hate to sound stupid but these lines with comment blocks, I can only assume you are generating these? Using what? Or did you only manually do them for the sake of example?
Yes, I added them to a screenshot of the code for the sake of example.
Shit.
Thanks for your article, Jason.
Awesome!!!
Nice Article