Writing Solid Code Professionally - How to level up your code to match Industry Standards?

Is there a difference between writing code at College and at Work? How should I approach writing code professionally for the first time?

Washington, USA

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There is a difference between writing code at College for your class assignments and how code gets written in the Industry by Professional Software Engineers. A lot of students are unaware of some of these simple yet important best practices of Software Engineering and may get started on the wrong foot when submitting their first code change. So, what are some of the best practices that you should keep in mind when writing your first lines of code on the job?

At college, we usually write code as part of small assignments or projects that are isolated and independently authored, without any significant dependencies. Additionally, once we are done with writing our code, it usually gets graded and becomes part of our historical record without any future ongoing development. This “fire and forget” model is a fundamental difference between code written at college vs code written professionally at work. In general, the code you write at work professionally is written on top of existing code bases, written over many years, and will likely be part of the product long after you have moved on to different parts of the code base or a different job. This inherent long term lifecycle of professional code requires professional software engineers to adhere to certain key Coding Style Guidelines when writing code.

There are a lot of different cultural aspects of Coding Styles that vary across multiple companies. Some companies have a central Coding Style Guidelines where the entire code base of the company has to adhere to a central Coding Style (e.g. Google). In other companies, there may be a different Coding Style Guideline for each product or organization based on differences that have evolved over many decades (e.g. Microsoft). Whether there is a company wide or a team wide Coding Style Guideline, it is important for you to reach out to your mentor or manager and start becoming familiar with it.

Tip #1: Understand the Coding Style Guidelines used by your team before you start writing your code. This is important to maintain your code long term.

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