Inspired by Raymond Hettingers talk in PyCon 2015. Although this evolved to be list of curated heuristics from my own experiences, my opinions and my thoughts not necessarily to limited to python.
Generally in our field people are evaluated for their analytical competencies. The belief is that for such a person learning to write clean code will be easy or he will certainly develop the skill. Although true to a certain extent from my experience this is not the case. This may happen to an experienced developer coming from a different language.
Here I do my best to jot down stuff in a way that is easy to develop that skill by providing a different perspective (I will try to be 3blue1brown) To intuitively understand why something is being done the way that it is being done. That sometimes taking things for granted is not the way forward. And I say this in retrospective. That means you can have your own opinion and challenge something I have written and we will probalbly sit together and do 6 thinking hats.
I used to be always against thumb rules. This effectively counters the statement above and lets things to be taken for granted. But it seems that the mind works in a similar fashion. It creates shortcuts to lessen the amount of data it needs to process. So keeping that in mind I would stick the content to two aspects. It will almost always (not necessarily) state a thumb rule and a following explanation.
If in case you need to see something in a different perspective on things that I haven't covered do the two things below:
- RTFM
- GROK
Read the f***ing manual - Corresponds to the thumb rule aspect. Nothing can give you the edge than reading the manual if there is one. I know there are certain manuals/ libraries that aren't user friendly. But learning to read them is also a skill. I had this realization with celery.
Grok - Corresponds to the understanding intutively aspect. You need to understand the philosophy. What was running through the author's mind when he did that. Read the philosphy section/ the why section (in some cases) if there is one.