Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

There was a season where I named things to sound smart.

Abbreviations only I understood. A helper called magic. Variables that made me feel like the author of something intricate.

Then I came back six months later and couldn’t read my own code.

The clever name protects your ego for a day and taxes every reader after. The boring name — pendingInvoices, hasExpired, retryCount — costs you nothing and pays out every time someone opens the file.

Now I treat a name like a promise. If I can’t say plainly what the thing holds, I don’t understand it well enough to have written it yet.

The best compliment my code gets now isn’t “clever.” It’s “obvious.” That one took me years.

– Serguey Asael Shinder