My take one this chapter
On this chapter they described a series of design principles. A lot of them were things that we kind of knew but it is really important to keep in mind and acknowledge their importance. The principle that I think it’s the most important one it’s the Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle (DRY). This one is the principle that I’ve broken the most.
My bad practices
When I’m breaking this principle I get the feeling when I’m doing it that it’s something bad. Most of the times it’s pure lazyness. I kinda know what I’m suppose to do to follow this principle. At first I tell myself that I just want to make things work and not worry about fancy things. But when I’m done with the things I wanted to “just work” I’m afraid that if I change something I might break my code. It’s a funny cycle I keep getting myself into.
An example
When I was doing a project with a friend that wasn’t from the school I broke the DRY principle several times. I had to connect to a database and I had to do it from several files. What I was wrongfully doing was that I wrote the information to connect to the database in every file. So I had an options object with the name of the database, password and username in every file. This is wrong in multiple levels. First of all, if I wanted to change the database the I connect to I would have to check in every single file for the name and change it. Secondly, the password was written in a lot of files of my project. If I upload my project to github it would be disastrous. In both cases I need to make a different file where I store the information and export it. And in every file that I need that information I import it. Finally, I would add this specific file to my .gitignore file, so that it is not uploaded to github.
What I should do
What I should strive to do is to start making things right from the very beginning. I think most of us programmers don’t do this because we sometimes feel like we’re not making any progress. It is difficult to do things right from the very beginning because we sometimes don’t know how.
Cellar Door Blog 