16 deadly code smells — Part 2

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.

Error handling

Murphy’s law states that,

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong

Error handling is simply part of all software. Every software created must have some form of error handling. Some inform users about the errors that occurred by displaying error messages. Some hide errors from users but still they log the incident somewhere for troubleshooting. But there are some developers who convince themselves that errors are imaginary and there is no need to handle them.

9. No-op error handlers