Question

Having the best forum website among developers, I think I will find a very good consensus of what policies and best practices make good coding. I will put some of them here, so I give the idea, but I will like to hear your opinion and the votes will probably be the judge of the best policies around.

• Specific Indentation for coding between development teams
• Specific comments before each method, before each variable declaration
• Naming conventions, camel case or any other.
• In HTML commenting after each container tag.
• In CSS, using each declaration only once.

You get the idea. I will like to know what things company ask us to do, and what of those really work to obtain maintainable and beautiful code.

Answer 1

I would focus any policies around development practices rather than code formatting. Some examples are:

• Always use parameterized SQL queries. Never concatenate user input into a query.
• Keep HTML, CSS and JavaScript in separate files.
• Use jslint or an equivalent tool every time you commit code.
• Pick an HTML standard (such as HTML 4.01 strict). All HTML must validate.

And don’t be a policy-nazi. Sometimes rules have to be broken—but there should be a very good reason for doing so.