High Standards
19 Sep 2017Have you ever tried really hard to make a team or pass a test and your skills just didn’t cut it? Everyone has experienced the feeling of “not being good enough”. Sometimes this is for good reason: you shouldn’t pass a driving test, if you can’t prove that you know the laws of the road and how to operate a vehicle accordingly. Other times, however, you feel like you were being underestimated or even judged for reasons that were trivial or even pompous. The worst example would be something similar to those vicious reality TV shows where you’re judged up against your peers in front a panel of experts…. roll the memes
Well that’s about what programming with a style inspector is like. I’ve recently been trying out the IntelliJ IDE used with the ESLint style inspector and interpreter for a JavaScript assignment. Honestly, it can feel a little disheartening when you put your program out there to compile, knowing it will work, only to feel the shade from the eyes of the compiler as it becomes your harshest critic. The screen fills with red lines screaming error. In the beginning this was really frustrating to deal with. After a little googling, I was able to find the ESLint documentation though. That really helped me narrow down the correct syntax that would solve my errors and stop the sass from IntelliJ.
I have to say that my post-perspective is much more grateful than my in-the-moment reception. Despite all of the frustration, about half of the errors that the debugger caught were in part due to my coding malpractice. In this way, using the inspector has already helped me improve my coding practices. Another benefit of using this coding standard is that it will make my code more readable. It would be hard to use a map app if one interface for one city was totally different from another.
This is exactly the problem that coding standardization tries to solve. It’s laying out an agreed upon style for their programs so that when a third party is looking at the code, they can easily understand or find what they are looking for. Standardization in general can seem a little over centralized, but anarchy usually leads to chaos and less productivity. This is why implementing coding standards in your IDE helps you improve your skills and always stick to the same template for organizing your code. Overall, the best way I can think to summarize using the ESLint inspector is basically like putting a big uncle Gandalf between your code and the actual compiler that will check whether or not your syntax style shall pass.
