Perfect code

I learned how to write perfect code. Seriously, and it’s not even that complicated. And it requires more social and business skills than technical ones.

Many software engineers, especially the experienced ones, will tell you that there is no such thing as perfect code. They have given up hope and accepted that the will never find the holy grail. I shifted perspective and turned an infinite game into a finite one. This allowed me to stop focusing on code, and move to more important things of software engineering.

Before I share my recipe, I’d like to clarify what does perfect means in this context. You might take the philosophical definition by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away

But there is also a more practical approach: a perfect code is one, which you cannot modify to make it any better. In other words, by modifying perfect code, you can only make it worse.

That being said, there are only two requirements your code needs to satisfy to become perfect:

• it needs to pass your team’s review
• it needs to correctly implement the business cases

Those are the ony two goals. It’s not about test coverage, architecture, readability, static analysis metrics or the framework used. I mean, your team will probably take those into account during review.

By adding anything more than is required by your peers to accept it, you are possibly overengineering the solution. If you’re implemented more business scenarios or edge cases, then you ain’t going to need it principle applies. And you are delaying releasing to production and delivering value to your users or customers, hence your solution becomes less than perfect.

This explicitly does not mean that the code can remain perfect over time. When revisiting it at a later date a lot of things will change: your understanding of the domain, technical methods and techniques, your team might grow and have different requirements, or maybe simply new business cases arrise. You will need continuous refactoring to keep it perfect.

But at the time of merging to main this is exactly what is needed, no more, no less. A perfect piece of code.