Close collaboration is essential not only to what we do at Elsewhen, but for efficient development and delivery of digital products in any context. To that end, it’s essential that best practices are not only established, but observed, iterated on and developed with the same speed as the tools they are designed to assist. While this isn’t a controversial position, it’s not often adopted as a practice nearly as often as it’s publicly espoused.
After all, maintaining someone else’s code is not a smooth process. It takes time to observe the project (folder structure, naming, dependencies, scripts etc.), find the pattern and develop the new feature in harmony and consistency with the existing code. Different developers use different styles which are derived from their different tastes. They may work on a project together or pick up someone else’s work. In both cases, having a common ground is essential.
For our part, we started to put together a Github repo of best practices for implementation of Javascript projects called Project Guidelines, both for our own purposes when working with freelancers on projects, and to share with the wider community.
Since its initial launch, the repo has had 57 different contributors, has been translated from its original English into Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, and has reached the ranking of #4 in London for Javascript repos, the top 10 overall in the UK, and received over 20k stars on Github.
The Project Guidelines have been featured by publications like Node Weekly, Hacker News, Javascript Jabber, Frontend Masters and JS Weekly among others, as well as being tweeted countless times. We also regularly meet developers at big name tech firms who tell us it’s been adopted internally.
You can view the Project Guidelines on Github here.
Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash
