Book Summary: The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

This is my first summary of a book. I wrote the notes for this book in 2019 and I still remember most of its points which I have implemented in my professional career. They have been really helpful throughout my journey and this is the reason why I thought of sharing the summary with you all. The book is The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin.

The Clean Coder

1. Professionalism

• Take responsibility for what you do.
• Must know your code works - be confident on test cases of the code.
• Do no harm to structure - code should be open for extension but closed for modification.
• Work ethics - Our career is our responsibility. We should take out time for ourselves to study out of the work hours.
• Know Your Field - minimal things to know:
  ▹ Design Patterns - GOF and POSA books
  ▹ Design Principles - SOLID
  ▹ Methods - XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, Structured Analysis, Structured Design.
  ▹ Discipline - TDD, Object-Oriented Design, Structured Programming, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming.
  ▹ Artifacts - UML, DFDs, Structure Chart, Petri nets, State Transition Diagrams.
• Try not to create bugs.
• QA should find nothing.
• Continuous Learning - read blogs, books, tweets, go to conferences. Learn things outside of your comfort zone.
• Practice - Repetition of a simple program to practice daily - kata. Eg. Calculate prime factors — fingers will run automatically.
• Collaboration and mentoring.
• Know the domain on which you are working on. Study books, blogs on the topic.
• Understand your customer and Clients.

2. Saying No - Do; or do not. There is no trying.

• Adversarial Roles (characterized by opposition/conflict) - Don’t stick to one person’s thoughts, try to have a conversation and understand the situation. Search for the best possible outcome.
• The most important time to say NO is when stakes are highest.
• Trying - you shouldn’t try until that’s the last option. Take full time for whatever you need. Give whatever it takes to do the work the right way.

3. Saying Yes

• Language of Commitment - There are 3 parts to making a commitment.
  ▹ You say you’ll do it.
  ▹ You mean it.
  ▹ You actually do it.
• Learn how to say yes. Commit with discipline. Don’t force yourself. Always be clear in beginning.

Tom coding in a hurry!

4. Coding

• Never do coding in worry or at 3 am or during sleepless nights/rushing/overtime.
• Get very few interruptions while coding. Give your coding time to only coding.
• Help -
  ▹ Get help whenever needed. Programming is hard.
  ▹ Help and mentor others.

5. TDD - Test Driven Development

• Advantages
  ▹ Defect injection rate reduces.
  ▹ Courage - Having suites of tests we lose the fear of refactoring code because if anything bad happens tests will fail and we’ll have to do the clean up.
  ▹ Documentation - easy to understand what code is doing.
  ▹ Design - if we write tests first, there is no force preventing us from coupling the functions together into an untestable mass.

6. Practicing

• Skill sharpening exercises like all other artists do to be perfect like musician, singer, dancer.
• Coding Dojo - group of programmers meet and practice together like martial artists.
• Kata - practice such that to teach your body to make each movement perfectly like a precise set of choreographed keystrokes and mouse movements that simulates to solve program problem.
• Wasa - like two person kata.
• Randori - a game of wasa.

7. Acceptance Tests

• Communication requirements - things that appear on paper are different on paper than they do in a working system.
• Definition of done.
• Purpose - communication, clarity, and precision.

8. Testing Strategies

• QA should find nothing.
• Test automation pyramid.
• Unit tests ► Component tests ► Integration tests ► System tests ► Manual Exploratory tests

9. Time Management

• 8 hours is a short period of time ► 480 minutes ► 28,800 seconds. Use this time as effectively and efficiently as possible.

10. Estimation

• Commitment and estimation are 2 different things.
  ▹ Commitment - you must achieve. To be done by a certain date.
  ▹ Estimation - It’s a guess. No promise is made.

11. Pressure

• Avoid pressure.
• Communicate when under pressure. Do pair programming.
• Rely on your disciplines.
• Get help.

12. Collaboration

• The team is most effective when team members collaborate professionally.

13. Teams and Projects

• Continuously work on team bonding.
• Teams are harder to build than projects.

14. Mentoring, Apprenticeship, and Craftsmanship

• Schools teach the theory of CS but cannot teach the discipline, practice, and skill of being a craftsman.
• These are achieved by personal mentoring.