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As the business world rapidly moves into the digital age, programmers and IT workers are an increasingly integral part of your workforce. Their day-to-day responsibilities can have a tremendous impact on everyone else’s output.

From keeping your website up and running to ensuring that your infrastructure works seamlessly in the back end, your programmers are a huge asset to the company. It’s more important than ever to integrate tech into your business plan. To help you get started, here are four important reminders to pass along to your tech team. 

Prioritize Readability Over Optimization

Readability and optimization are usually the most prioritized aspects of any codebase—a collection of source code used to build a software system, application, or  component. With optimization, coders focus on efficiency. They look for ways to get more done with less resources. While peak efficiency is certainly something to strive for, it can’t be achieved with sloppy, reckless code.

For that reason, readability should be the number one priority for your team. Otherwise, making future changes to the codebase will be a time-consuming and complex task. By emphasizing clean, readable code, you’ll enjoy fewer bugs in the system and greater efficiency.

Encourage your programmers to write clean code. It should be simple, consistent, and well-structured so that new team members can easily jump in and navigate the codebase. Once this clean baseline is established, your programmer(s) can begin plans for code optimization.

Think of the Architecture

Due to the changing nature of computer programing, software architecture has varied definitions. But it essentially refers to the fundamental organization of a system— including its defining components, structural layout, and environment. Like traditional buildings, software architecture relies on a detailed blueprint to guide its development. So when you think of the architecture, you’re essentially thinking back to the defining principles and vision of the project.

The mindset of programmers in many of the world’s tech hubs, like California’s Silicon Valley, is to build things fast. Unfortunately, architecture is an important element that often gets overlooked in a programmer’s efforts to code quickly. Writing code without having any architectural design in mind is like running your business without a customer acquisition plan—it just doesn’t work.

Leave Comments

Source code is the human-read instructions that the programmer writes when first building a project. Later on, this code enters a compiler that translates it into 1’s and 0’s for the computer to read. As the source code grows, it becomes more and more important to leave comments within the codebase. Beyond that, it’s also considered common courtesy between programmers and IT professionals.

Take this strategy one step further by asking your programmers to only leave comments around bad code. Readable code should be easy to understand without the need for comments. Remember, readability is the goal here.

Because one- or two-word comments isn’t enough, encourage your programmers to leave clear, succinct comments. Also, request that they limit the size of files and regularly double-check their work.

Be in the Right Mindset While Coding

When programmers and IT experts are tired, they are more likely to make mistakes and write buggy code/scripts. For example, if your developer is being reckless while working on your website, they might write incomplete code that will result in error pages and unresponsive links when navigating through your site.

Obviously, you don’t want that. Your site needs to be clean and easy-to-use for all visitors. Encountering buggy scripts will lead people to quickly abandon your site. So encourage your tech people to take regular breaks and de-stress. Stepping away from their computer screens for at least five minutes not only revitalizes focus but also prevents unwanted health complications. Even short breaks will greatly improve the work and mindset of your tech team.

Final Thoughts

Post helpful reminders for your tech team so they will see them on a day-to-day basis. By encouraging your team to be mindful as they work, you’ll save time and avoid the headache of a bug-infested codebase.  

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