Variable Name Antipatterns Named and Explained

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. – Phil Karlton Let’s talk about variable name antipatterns! ...

April 3, 2023

Better Than 'foo'

There’s almost always a better variable name or value than ‘foo’. It’s useful as a debugging placeholder, but it almost never belongs in production code, even and especially in automated tests. ...

July 13, 2022

How to Make Renames Easy

Names in software are hard. But what’s worse than a bad name? Sticking with it because you can’t change it. I want us all to be able to effortlessly and fearlessly fix bad names, and that’s the topic of this post. ...

March 22, 2022

Avoid Similar Variable Names

A common, problematic convention I see in Ruby tests are variable names like this: user_a = create(:user, last_log_in: today) user_b = create(:user, last_log_in: last_year) ...

February 14, 2022