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How to name software things, be a good programmer & work solo

Arpit Mohan on October 07, 2019

My TL;DR style notes from articles I read today. Effectively Naming Software Thingies “Programs are meant to be read by humans and onl...

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Simon Newby • Oct 7 '19 • Edited

I'm feeling bad about the database I tossed up last week where all the ID columns are called ID rather than <tablenameID now... 😳

Arpit Mohan • Oct 8 '19

I actually prefer that instead of tablenameID. I typically don't like alliteration in my SQL queries or code function calls. I'd much rather invoke select * from users where id = ? instead of select * from users where userid=?

I find the first one more readable and understandable as well.

Evaldas Buinauskas • Oct 8 '19 • Edited

This isn't generally bad. I worked with both and having TableNameID makes a lot of sense when you write more SQL code. It makes join conditions way easier to read.

Simon Newby • Oct 8 '19

Yeah definitely, and since I'm using the ids to correspond to other numeric columns in one base table then using a view to display strings instead of underlying integers, I think it's passable for the time being.

Daniyal • Oct 8 '19

It seems pretty okay for a database since the context gives it meaning and using 'id' is pretty common in database lands. i.e. don't feel bad!

Evaldas Buinauskas • Oct 7 '19

I've recently made a change in our api where we had three data properties where each meant totally different thing. 🤔

Arpit Mohan • Oct 8 '19

Are they now named data1 , data2 and data3 ? 😛

Evaldas Buinauskas • Oct 8 '19

No! : ) It is paginated research data and JSON previously looked like this:

{
    "page": 1,
    "size": 3,
    "total": 3,
    "data": [
        {
            "countryId": 1,
            "categoryId": 2,
            "data": [
                { "year": 2012, "data": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2013, "data": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2014, "data": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2015, "data": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2016, "data": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2017, "data": 123.45 }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Now it's been renamed to be as follows, which is 1000 times better!

{
    "page": 1,
    "size": 3,
    "total": 3,
    "results": [
        {
            "countryId": 1,
            "categoryId": 2,
            "timeSeries": [
                { "year": 2012, "value": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2013, "value": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2014, "value": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2015, "value": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2016, "value": 123.45 },
                { "year": 2017, "value": 123.45 }
            ]
        }
    ]
}