WDRL 151

Hi, I’m Anselm Hannemann. Freelance webdesigner, frontend engineer, advisor. Curating WDRL, growing vegetables on a market garden farm.

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Hey,

in the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of code. As a freelancer working on multiple big projects with a lot of people, you’ll inevitably see all varieties of code styles. But I also realized how much writing JavaScript changed over the past years.
Having learned JavaScript before ES6 was there, a great mentor (Hans Christian Reinl) taught me the most important lesson: Always write clean, understandable code. To avoid ternary operators, to declare variables in one place, to make functions as simple as possible. Avoid ternary operators, declare variables in one place, make functions as simple as possible. Basically things that so many JavaScript style guides also advise. But with the growing adoption of ES6/ES2015, I also saw an increase of code where most of these principles (except for keeping functions small) are ignored.
I think it has something to do with the increased flexibility of ES6. A lot of developers probably think since arrow functions — which are shorter than a normal function — can be used, they should also write everything else in the shortest, smartest way. However, in my opinion and experience, this leads to a less maintainable codebase, one that’s hard to read for people who don’t work on it on a daily basis. Be smarter! By applying simplicity and not cleverness to your code.

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Anselm