Introduction

In the current age code is written everywhere, quite literally everywhere, right? Financials, Automobile, Agriculture, Manufacturing and pretty much all other Industries big or small are to larger or lesser extent either producing code or at least consuming it in a compiled form. It could be argued that all modern businesses nowadays utilise code in some shape or form in order to innovate and quite frankly to survive.

This document is a lessons learnt resource that’s been put together on the back of decades of experience in writing code, doing code reviews and producing mission critical solutions built and running on code.

Guidance in this resource can be applied with any programming language and any platform where the compiled code is running on. It’s simply a guide for anyone undertaking programming with any kind of code.

Background

The primary reason why dirtydozen is here is because almost all common programming mistakes just keep occurring - repeatedly! Therefore, the idea was to document these mistakes and make the result of this process widely available to help everyone produce clean code.

Why dirtydozen, well, there’s no hiding from the fact that the idea behind it is somehow derived from an excellent resource, methodology for that matter, known as The Twelve-Factor App. I’m sure most self-respecting programmers or operations individuals are, in fact should, be aware of it.

While The Twelve-Factor App is a recipe for writing highly scalable and performing applications. The dirtydozen on the other hand is a catalogue of most common dirty code smells that should be avoided as far as code quality is concerned.

Who should read this document?

Mostly developers or programmers at any stage in their programming journey responsible for writing and reviewing code.