Four Ways To Make Your Code More Maintainable

Photo by Goran Ivos on Unsplash

Fixing bugs and adding new features — that’s pretty much the daily routine of a software developer. How easy it is to execute these two tasks really depends on what kind of codebase you are dealing with. If it’s highly maintainable, your job is a breeze. If it is not, your job quickly becomes a nightmare.

In this article, I’ll go over four ways that can make your code more maintainable, which will ultimately make your colleagues like you more (or at least hate you less).

Dependency Injection

This is a fundamental software principle, that is unfortunately often overlooked. Dependency injection enables your application to easily substitute one dependency with another. By dependency I mean any third party tool or API that your program might use. For example, if you are building an application that validates phone numbers, the dependencies would be a client that sends SMS messages to these phone numbers, and a client to some kind of database where you store validation codes.

In order to properly implement dependency injection, you essentially need to do two things:

1. Define an abstraction that describes the expected behaviour of these dependencies. This is usually done by creating an interface or abstract class, depending on which programming language you…