Self-documenting Code
Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly.
At first glance, this function doesn’t look too bad apart from its use of cryptic error message codes. The argument user is apparently an object that contains information about the user to be created. There are a few lines of code that checks if the password conforms to the password policy, using regular expressions. Then, there is a check to see if the user account already exists. Finally, if all the checks pass, the user’s password is hashed, and a function to create the new user is called; it probably returns something on success.
Software developers frequently deal with abstract ideas and complex systems. Translating these abstractions into concrete, meaningful names that accurately reflect their behavior isn’t always straightforward. However, that isn’t really an excuse when we’re dealing with well-understood processes like user account creation, as in our example.
