My Top 7 Clean Code Tips for Android Developers (You Can Immediately Apply These!)

Proper coding style is fundamental if you want to build solid apps. In this video, you'll learn about 7 tips, you can immediately follow to make your code style a lot better.

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00:00 - The Rule of Three
01:22 - Don't comment what happens
03:29 - Don't be afraid of long names
04:31 - Avoid genius code
06:57 - Follow the Law of Demeter
09:35 - Avoid side-effects
10:52 - Avoid if-else

[codinginflow]

I like the Rule of Three. I've been doing that intuitively

[bty_s]

7 tip - it has unofficial name of "return early pattern" :)
3 tip - I agree with third tip about long name, but i can't completely agree with the example you show there. For me it is okey to have function like findPerson(name:String), because param name inside braces says itself about condition. Also such naming as findPersonByName downgrades possibilities of using methods overload which is really nice feature to have, where you have findPerson(name: String), findPerson(id: Int), etc.

[AbdulelahAGR]

I wish you were there 4 years ago when I was still new programmer. Your content would've saved me learning things the hard way and would save me from some YouTuber how just give wrong information. It is only a matter of time before you become one of the best recognized YouTubers in the android dev community. Good luck

[buszi_]

To be honest the "Rule of Three" is a trap, it is nice to not repeat yourself, but now let's imagine a case where you have refactored the code to not repeat yourself, and let's say that you have like 5 occurrences of your code that you replace with some kind of base class of whatever, now let's imagine that you need to change the behavior but only in one of your occurrence, but you have extracted this code to a single shared piece of code, so you either need to give up on using this shared code for this occurrence or use some kind of flag or whatever passed to this base code, okay, you've got it done, now you need to again change the behavior of another occurrence, but only this one, now you're in the same situation like before, and it becomes messy as hell

Overall the awareness of not repeating yourself is good, but forcing it to not repeat yourself actually makes the possibility of changes really limited and error-prone

[jeepaholic]

I bought both of your courses and I'm learning so much. You are a huge help! A video about Entry forms would be great (like a bunch of titles with matching edit text fields) I'm struggling to grasp the concept of Lazy column/ RecyclerView with this scenario. Either way, thank YOU!

[clamum]

Good stuff big 🐕. Agreed with all of them.

I've been doing software development professionally since shortly after college, so about 15 years, and I've seen most of those often. The pointless comments and crappy variable/class/function names the most often. There's no good reason not to have descriptive (reasonably so) names for things; abbreviating things and making names like 6 characters long is just unnecessary and makes maintainability more difficult. Heck I even didn't do that at a previous job where I did a fair amount of VB6 coding (shudder), where there was no Intellisense (although you could press Tab to autocomplete names if they were already correct iirc, it was a good check).

[tadeogonzalezalvarez]

Thanks! I just found your channel and with you I learn good practices and English at the same time, my day to day I use patterns, refactoring and smell codes, it would be interesting if you made more content of good practices. No matter how much you know a language or SDK (Android), the next level as a programmer is this.

[arfinhosain]

genius boy, still uploading videos, Even though he is traveling south africa, what a boy

[PawanGupta]

Thanks for share. You covered good amount of tips in short video.

[riyupapa]

Thank you for this Video~ it's very worthfull~
Does Secret number 5 ( Follow the Law of Demeter ) means the "Capsulation"?

[ciach_]

Well, my example of genius code is needed when I don't want to repeat myself.
Check this example:
if (prop == "something" || prop == "something_else" || prop == "anything") {}

you can shorten it to this:

if (listOf("something", "something_else", "anything").contains(prop)) {}

it's shorter and you avoid repeating yourself.

[kimcherwoo]

hi Philipp, could you make a video explaining some of Google's architecture sample apps ? I tried to look into those but it was not that straightforward. Thank you!

[RanbirSingh-dlco]

I agreed with all the points but about comments. I guess people should add comments what they feel like it's totally subjective.. your code might read by someone who just started learning things few says ago...also it effect dev performance..he/she has to think about what should be the comment.. comments should be natural...it can be improved later...when you code focus on logic .

[bitwisedevs]

I would also like to add that you should avoid adding different logic code in one function. For example you have calculateDistance(), it should only contains logic related to its name and don't add irrelevant logic like conversion and etc. It should be a separate function.

[AliasdHacker]

Well done - You have interesting names for some of these rules. I didn't know 'field encapsulation' was called the law of demeter.

[larrystreehouse]

Please mention more about law of Demeter. From my work experience, there are a lot of incomplete codes using Clean Architecture and Util functions which break the the law of Demeter. Given repeating functions are found, what is the rule of thumb on when to categorize functions into UseCase and when to let functions alone as util function?

[yayiiz]

In the last section of the video, you can actually remove the {} associated with the "if" statement and make it a one liner:
if (isActive) return

[nicolasfelipe]

very good one, the last tip i thought i was a weirdo cause i use it a lot.

[r_yan]

Hey Phillip
Can you make a video on new project level gradle model
I am little bit confused about adding classpath and other thing in it

[baselnat]

nice video, could you please share an example of testing android project with clean architecture i am having difficulties to understand how to test viewmodels, test cases and the view with states and events