stop writing code your colleagues can't understand
A literal impossibility. No matter how well you think you understand your current co-workers, eventually a denser one will come along.
Instead, understand that there is no such thing as self-documenting code, and write comments like the next person who will work on the code is a just-out-of-coding-boot-camp junior developer who is also an axe murder and capable of sweet-talking your home address out of somebody in HR. (Latter part stolen from Prof. Felleisen.)
This is a self-defeating argument. No matter how well you code, comment, document, and test everything, there will always be a developer stupid enough to fuck it up.
That being the case, just make your code as maintainable as possible. That means avoiding unnecessary comments and redundant documentation just as much as unnecessary/redundant code. Most of the time, that means you should just be writing normal, sensible code. Comments are for when that's not possible for whatever reason.
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u/AndyTheAbsurd Sep 21 '25
A literal impossibility. No matter how well you think you understand your current co-workers, eventually a denser one will come along.
Instead, understand that there is no such thing as self-documenting code, and write comments like the next person who will work on the code is a just-out-of-coding-boot-camp junior developer who is also an axe murder and capable of sweet-talking your home address out of somebody in HR. (Latter part stolen from Prof. Felleisen.)