A Year with Code Standards

Last December the developers at iMarc agreed upon a series of code standards.

At the time, there were four developers working at iMarc. Normally, each developer could be found working on a different project (or two, or three). Because iMarc also hosts a large number of websites, each developer also spent part of his day updating and maintaining older projects.

A typical slice in any day might have seen:
* Bill working on a new project;
* Fred adding a new section to a site that I built 2 years ago;
* Will finishing a new site with some help from me;

We all were constantly seeing, and sometimes working on, each other's code, but there were no set rules about how everyone should write code.

We all had our own quirks. There are a million ways to name a database, name files, quote and concatenate strings, indent code, or capitalize method names. Through sheer osmosis, the four of us generally had similar styles, but it still took a fair amount of time to get grounded when first working on someone else's project.

At the time, iMarc was planning to grow. The four of us got together and decided to author some ground rules that we, and any developers hired in the future would follow.

After much debate, we came up with the iMarc Code Standards.

No matter how big or small your company is, I highly recommend using code standards.

A year with code standards has easily saved iMarc developers 30-40 developer hours. We now have six developers and I'm guessing that each of us saves at least 1/2 hour per month not thinking about what a database table might be named, what a function call is named, or other mundane issues solved by code standards.

Again, feel free to check out our code standards. Enjoy!