16 deadly code smells — Part 1

Code smells that are considered fatal during coding interviews

I will not write any more bad code

Every programming language has one or more coding style guidelines. All developers know that but some of them don’t care. They practice bad programming habits for years without realizing the importance of the issues they caused.

As one of the hiring managers at Zuhlke Hong Kong, I’ve seen a lot of code smells during coding interviews. Here are the top 16 bad coding practices organized into 6 categories: coding style, dirty code, testing, error handling, code complexity, and optimization.

The first 8 code smells are covered in Part 1 and the rest in Part 2.

Coding styles

Ignoring the importance of coding styles usually indicates the lack of experience in creating software and reading other people’s code. It’s hard for inexperienced developers to understand the benefits of using a consistent coding style.

1. Inconsistent coding style

Consistency is one of the most dominant attitudes that good developers have. Being consistent is a result of logical thinking, which is a core element in software development. Every action that a developer chooses to take is because of some reasoning that the developer believes that…