Recently, we asked Milovan what tips he would give to anyone who is interested in upping their backend game, and boy did he deliver! With years of experience under his belt, he developed a keen eye for optimizing backend development processes, so he carefully curated a list of best practices and shared them with us in an easy-to-follow format.

Coding:

• Try not to use comments in your code. Aspire to write “self-commenting” code. Give your functions and variables meaningful names, keep your functions short, and functions with more complex logic should read like a story, not like code.
• Remove unneeded indentations, and try to have at most 3 indentations in a given function, one of the ways to do this is to have an early exit.
• Avoid using hardcoded strings in code, make a constant and use those instead, the main reason is easy accessibility and only a single point of failure, also strings are harder to look for in a large codebase.

Better organization:

• Use your IDE to its full advantage, and make sure to learn key shortcuts, this can make your life a lot easier (some that can be of help in Visual Studio are ALT+ENTER, F12, SHIFT+F12, CTRL+-…).
• Don’t start working on any new functionality immediately after you get it. Take a minute to think about what you need to do, and how it interacts with your other systems. Write down the problem and the first solution, then write an alternative solution. This can provide a lot of insights into the problem you are facing, and it is always better to lose 30 minutes on planning than two weeks on bad code that was your first idea.
• Keep your technical debt to a minimum, and your codebase clean and neat, when prototyping functionalities make as big of a mess as you like, but be sure to clean and refine the code afterwards.

Unit Tests:

• When writing unit tests do not test other people’s code. This means do not test system functions and third-party code, only test your code and business logic. Unit tests are as important as your business logic code, so make sure you maintain them as well.

Milovan Novaković is our senior software engineer with more than 14 years of work experience, he is currently in the position of .Net developer, and in addition, he is also a People Manager, Tech Lead and System Architect. In his career, he worked on various projects, from desktop applications, through backend API to full-stack development. He has also worked with Oracle, SQL Databases, MS SQL Server and so on, on over 10 major FinTech projects.