So a quick update on my Clean Code book challenge. I’m starting on chapter 5 this evening. The first four chapters covered variable naming, function naming, code commenting, and generally what is clean code. Chapter five looks to structure and format code and I’m looking forward to that. Although I have to wonder if this topic is dated as most modern IDE’s automatically structure and format code blocks, so we’ll see how it goes.

I’m really enjoying the topics and while I’m reading it I’m reflecting on code I’ve written in the past. This reflection has made me think of my programming skills and a general timeline of how much I’ve progressed in just this past year. A year ago I knew nothing about design patterns, my understanding of polymorphism was limited at best and most of my code was tightly coupled and used singleton patterns throughout. All terrible design decisions for object oriented coding.

Here’s an example of some bad code I found, while I haven’t refactored this code yet as I have bigger plans for the project that this code resides in. I think highlighting at-least some of terrible decisions I made, reinforces the topics learned in Clean Code

/*------------------------------
 POPULATE BLE WITH ADV DATA
 -------------------------------*/
-(void)populateData:(NSDictionary *)advertisement :(CBPeripheral *)peripheral :(NSNumber *)RSSI
{
    NSData *rawData = [advertisement objectForKey:@"kCBAdvDataManufacturerData"];
    [rawData getBytes:&myData length:sizeof(myData)];
    if(myData.compId == 7057) {
        NSLog(@"POPULATE DATA OBJECT");
        _compId = myData.compId;                // Company Identifier
        _deviceName = [peripheral name];        // Device Name
        _temp = myData.temperature / 100.0;        // temperature divided by 100 to return xx.x format
        _rampRate = myData.rampRate;            // How quickly the temp is rising
        _dutyFactor = myData.dutyFactor;        // PLACE HOLDER
        _flagStatus = myData.statusFlag;        // Device Status
        _speedRPM = myData.speedRpm;            // Device revolutions per minute
        _vibration = myData.vib;                // Device Vibration
        _radioStatus = myData.radioStatus;      // BLE Radio status
        _cycleTimer = myData.cycleTimer;        // PLACE HOLDER
        _batteryLevel = myData.batteryLevel;    // Battery level
        _currentAlarm = myData.alarms;
        _macAddress = [Utility getMacAddress:myData.mac];  // Device MAC Address
        _lastUpdate = [NSDate date];            // Last time the device sent an advertisement packet
        NSLog(@"current alarm packet: %hu",_currentAlarm);
        if([RSSI isEqual: @127]) {             // Update RSSI if value is NOT 127
            NSLog(@"127 BUG");
            NSLog(@"RSSI: %@ RSSI PREVIOUS: %@",RSSI,rssiPrevious);
            _rssi = rssiPrevious;
        } else {
            _rssi = RSSI;
            rssiPrevious = RSSI;
        }        
        _hasAuthorized = false;
        _updateTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:.5
                                                        target:self
                                                      selector:@selector(updateLastUpdateTime)
                                                      userInfo:nil
                                                       repeats:YES];
        _isConnectable = [[advertisement objectForKey:CBAdvertisementDataIsConnectable] boolValue];      
    }
}

If you’ve read this far and still don’t know what this code is doing, let me help. Its taking a bluetooth low energy Advertisement packet, dropping it into a data structure. The code first of all takes too many arguments, as pointed out by Robert Martin, 3 arguments is too many. Code comments create excessive noise, naming convention on the method itself is obscure and not capitalized. The log statements though-out create more noise. Overall the entire code block is too loo long as well. I also dislike the constants that are defined within the method itself, for example the 7057 is a manufacturer id, what if they change their ID? this entire method would break.

Anyway, if you haven’t started reading this book yet please do. It’s very enlightening, I’m learning a ton.

I’ll see you guys tomorrow when we continue our journey down C# and discuss methods.

Happy Coding,

Corey