Starting from Principles
Starting new projects always carries great responsibility but also offers a great opportunity to improve it by applying learnings from previous projects. Fortunately I’m currently in this position as one of the early developers on a greenfields project that’s been running for the last two weeks.
What I’m attempting to do this time is that instead of defining and/or enforcing a set of coding standards and patterns used throughout the project, I’m hoping to capture the thinking that goes along side the decisions as we make them, distilling them into a set of core principles we’re striving for. By capturing these core principles I hope it makes it easier for new people to come on board, provide a better context for analysing the code artefacts we create and still leaves an open discussion for newcomers to suggest better ways of achieving these same principles.