How I Stumbled Through Jesse Le’s Tips (And Survived)
So, saw this talk about “Jesse Le tips” floating around. Figured, hey, maybe he’s cracked some code on writing cleaner stuff. My own spaghetti code was getting mind-bendingly messy. Time to poke around.
First step? Google. Just typed in “Jesse Le tips”. Expected maybe a neat blog post or something official. Nope. Got buried under stuff about actors, athletes, a million other Jesse Le’s. Zero technical stuff. Frustrating start.
Okay, plan B. Hunted on the place programmers usually chat. You know the one. Searched again. This time, bingo! Found a thread where folks were actually discussing coding habits mentioned by Jesse Le. Not some official gospel, just people remembering bits.
What did folks say he stressed?
- Tiny changes: Like, don’t try to fix the whole mountain of code in one go. Sand away just one ugly corner.
- Meaningful names: Calling something “x” or “temp” is asking for future headaches. Be boringly clear.
- Check yourself later: Write something, walk away for five minutes (coffee break!), come back and see if it still makes sense.
Simple, right? Sounds obvious? Yeah, laugh all you want. But I never actually did that last one. Seriously. I’d hammer out code and immediately jump to the next problem.
Alright, decided to try it out on this awful config file parser I’d made months ago. Looking at it now felt like deciphering ancient runes. My bad. First target? Just the variable names.
Found this line: `var d = c[“t”];` What the actual heck?! What was `d`? What was `t`? Brain completely empty. My heart sank. Had to dig into docs I wrote (thank god I did that!) to figure out `t` was “timeout”. Pathetic. Renamed it brutally: `var connectionTimeout = config[“timeout”];` Instant upgrade. Still ugly, but now I knew it was ugly.
Feeling slightly smug after fixing names in one file, I tackled the “five-minute rule”. Wrote a new function to validate some user input. Felt clever at the moment. Then I forced myself to stand up, refill my water bottle, stare out the window for a bit. Honestly felt dumb.
Came back, looked at the function. It hit me like a brick: “Why is this thing doing two different checks?” I had mushed validation and error message formatting together. Because I was “in the zone” earlier. Five minutes away and the fog cleared. Split that function right there. One to check the input, another to yell about what was wrong. Much cleaner.
Didn’t magically fix my whole project, obviously. But starting small, just renaming crap and forcing those mini-breaks? Huge difference maker on that day. Code felt less like a hostile alien and more like… my own chaotic mess, but understandable. Baby steps beat standing still, I guess.