By Katy Imhoff

Spring has arrived, and we’re not talking about Spring MVC. This time of year everyone is ready to shake off the shackles of winter and start fresh. The time for spring cleaning is here! This year we’d like you to take a different approach.

The fact is, many IT employers emphasize the necessity of clean code. If their employees work on a team it’s often one of the most crucial aspects of a developer’s skills. It’s easy to slip into sloppy code writing or forget a few things over the years so even if you’re a veteran at writing code, it might not always be as clean as it needs to be. Time to make a change! Here are a few resources we found to help you out:

1)   Clean Code Bible: Okay, so that’s not actually the title of Robert C. Martin’s revered text on coding. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship promises to instill the values of a software craftsman into its readers. This book helps beginners understand the difference between functioning code and clean code and reminds veteran programmers that there’s always room for improvement.

2)   Just Press Clean: Although your boss might not encourage it, using sites like Dirty Markup are a quick and easy way to catch your mistakes. Just input your HTML, CSS or JavaScript code and press the clean button. Although we don’t encourage relying on this to clean up your code for you, it’s a great tool for pointing out some messy mistakes you might not realize you’re making. It erases the mistakes from your original code so it’s easy to compare the original to the cleaned up version to see where sloppiness resides in your code. Then take the initiative to make adjustments!

3)    Cheat Sheet: If you find yourself committing minor code offenses but don’t have much time to study, review some online coding guidelines. They’ll give you a crash course in clean code and are easy to refer to at a moment’s notice.

Your front-end design may be streamlined and visually appealing, but that doesn’t mean your backend coding is without clutter. Take time this spring to adopt clean coding habits. Your teammates and employers—both future and present—will thank you for it.