During a recent vacation I had the opportunity to help my brother-in-law with a project. It took a few iterations but we managed to get some code written which fulfilled the need in just a few nights’ work. Though the complexity was about the same as my own small personal projects, this project was different.  It was for a client — albeit a client who I wasn’t charging money for the work.  Someone else was going to read and maintain this code so I knew that I had to take some measures that I hadn’t been used to taking recently.

The first was refactoring. I refactored the crap out of this application — and for the most part things worked out nicely. I was able to turn all my poorly named and one-character variable names into elements and objects with meaningful monikers.

Commenting was the next step.  After the refactoring was completed I could move on to the next step of the application which was to put in some descriptive comments in the applications.  These comments describe not the what, but the why.   This is the approach I’ve tried to take relying on good naming within the application to describe the what, and comments to provide rationale.

The final thing I did was take my brother-in-law through the code.  He has a background in software but has never done much in the way of OO (he writes Cobol) and hasn’t ever worked with the .NET languages.  In doing the walkthrough we came across a few minor issues and a couple of small enhancements for the application.

All told I spent about 25 hours working on this project, and in that short amount of time, I really did begin to regain my programming chops.  I’ve got a ways to go yet before I get to a level that I’d be comfortable with, but it’s a start.