Revisiting: Clean Up Your Code by Applying These 7 Rules

Source: Dev.to

About five years ago I wrote a post titled “Clean Up Your Code by Applying These 7 Rules.” At the time I was focused on writing clearer, more readable code and sharing practical techniques that helped me improve my day‑to‑day work.

Looking back, that focus makes sense. Clean code promises clarity, maintainability, and a sense of control over growing complexity. Back then I approached the topic mostly from the perspective of an individual contributor trying to write better software.

Five years later I still agree with the intent of that post, but my understanding of when and how those ideas should be applied has evolved.

If you want to read the original version first, you can find it here:
Clean Up Your Code by Applying These 7 Rules

What Still Holds Up

Several ideas from the original post have aged well because they are rooted in communication rather than specific techniques.

• Readable code remains one of the best investments you can make. Clear naming, simple control flow, and small, focused units of logic make it easier for others (and your future self) to understand what a piece of code is trying to do.
• The Boy Scout Rule—leaving code slightly better than you found it—still resonates. Small improvements compound over time, and a codebase benefits from care and attention rather than neglect.
• These principles work because they are tool‑agnostic. They help the next person who reads the code, which often turns out to be your future self—or even an LLM that tries to generate readable code based on yours.

What Feels Incomplete Today

The original assumption that cleanup is always the obvious next step no longer holds.

• Early in my career I treated cleanup as a local activity: I saw something I didn’t like, applied a rule, and moved on. Over time I learned that cleanup is rarely just about the code; it’s about context, ownership, timing, and intent.
• Refactoring without understanding why a piece of code exists can be risky. What looks redundant or overly defensive may be protecting against a constraint you’re unaware of. Removing it can introduce subtle bugs or undo deliberate decisions.
• Technical decisions are often driven by product needs, deadlines, or organizational constraints. In those cases “clean” is not the primary goal; shipping something that works is.
• The rules were never wrong, but they were incomplete without context.

Evolving Perspective on Cleanup

Working on larger and older systems forced me to slow down and reconsider my approach.

• Inheritance of code I didn’t write highlighted that understanding usually creates more value than immediately improving aesthetics.
• I began to see cleanup as a shared responsibility rather than an individual one. In a team, even well‑intended refactoring can have side effects; small local changes can ripple outward and affect others in unexpected ways.
• Knowing why something exists matters more than knowing how to improve it.

Clean code is not a checklist; it is a byproduct of understanding.

Rules are helpful starting points, but judgment is what makes them useful. Sometimes the right choice is to refactor; sometimes it is to document intent; sometimes it is to leave things as they are and revisit them later.

The Goal

The goal is not perfection. The goal is stewardship and delivering value to customers.

I still believe in writing clean code, and I also believe that respecting what came before is part of that responsibility. Code is a record of decisions made under pressure, with the information available at the time, often under constraints we no longer see.

Revisiting my old post reminded me that learning is not always about new ideas. Sometimes reframing old ones can be even more valuable.

In general, these rules have helped me write better code over the past five years, but experience has taught me when to apply them.