How clear coding rules can free up your team

It's no secret. I'm a fan of rules.

I find them useful because they free teams from needing to make a lot of decisions or invite a lot of unproductive debate, especially on trivial things.

This is especially useful with an endlessly-flexible framework like Laravel, where there are multiple ways to make something work.

Even better, a rule should be so well-defined that you can implement it with tooling. This way the rules can be enforced and applied automatically, long before a human code reviewer needs to take a look.

A truly great rule should also come with the "why". Why did we decide to write code this way? What makes it preferred to a different way of writing it? Having a reason is easier to remember and makes it feel less arbitrary.

The next time you find yourself in a debate about code, consider if it could be solved by having the debate one time, and then enforcing a rule automatically.

Here to help,

Joel

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