I’d like to think that one of the things that most good developers continually strive for is writing the cleanest, most maintainable code possible.

Personally, I don’t know if there is an actual point at which you reach it – it’s the whole journey-not-a-destination thing – but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continually aim to get better at what we do. In our case, that’s writing clean WordPress code.

The thing is, there’s only so far you can get on your own. You can read a number of books, follow the advice of some high profile programmers, and read as much of the “academic” material that you can get your hands on – and I think all of the above is great – but, at the same time, it only goes so far.

To that end, I think it’s worth seeking out other people in your same field to help provide some level of mentorship on how it relates to writing clean code because here’s the thing:

As much material as we can read written by other people, nothing beats interacting with those who are writing code in the same language(s) for the same APIs under the same coding standards and who are farther along than you in experience.

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In building software – especially at the enterprise level – one phrase that’s used to describe the work that goes into understanding what all needs to make up an application is that of the “problem space” or the “problem domain.”

This is important because part of the process of understanding the problem domain is learning the language, the terminology, and the concepts that go into building an application.

For example, say you’re building a job board. You’re likely to have something like:

• Job Posts
• Resumes
• Recruiters
• Employers
• Employees
• Candidates
• …and so on

These ideas are then taken and ultimately converted into code.

Sometimes, developers will use the terminology associated with the problem domain (and this is part of domain-driven design) in their code; other times, the problem may get solved but the code may not completely reflect the problem space at the code level.

At any rate, one of the things that I see – as designers and/or developers – doing is using terminology that is more frequently associated with how we view WordPress than how users do.

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According to Wikipedia, kaizen is defined like so:

Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the best”, refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, business management or any process.

Generally speaking, this is used to talk about the continuous improvement of a product. It’s also a core idea of lean manufacturing that has also been adapted into lean software development.

Anyway, the idea isn’t anything new and I honestly think now, more than ever, more people are familiar with the idea (even if it isn’t practiced) than ever before especially because some applications use the word in the release notes for their application.

Paper By FiftyThree mentions it with nearly every release.

As far as building products is concerned, this is something that I think many designers and developers want to do (if they aren’t already doing it, of course), but it are sometimes hindered by the nature of their environment.

By that, I mean that can we do continuous improvement – that is, can we practice kaizen – on projects that aren’t deployed on any type of particular schedule?

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