When I first started coding, I saw coding standards as nothing more than a bunch of annoying rules I had to follow before turning in an assignment. A lot of my classmates feel the same way. People focus on small details like whether to use two spaces or four for indentation or where to place a closing curly brace. Honestly, I used to think it was all pretty pointless.
But that changed after I got some industry experience during an internship. I realized that in the real world, coding standards are essential for keeping large projects organized and manageable. When you’re working with multiple people on the same project, coding standards help keep everything consistent, improve readability, and make it easier for everyone to collaborate.
The importance of coding standards really stands out when you’re working on a team project. If there were no rules for how the code should be written, every developer would use their own unique style. This would make it super confusing to read and understand the code, especially for someone new who joins the team later. But when everyone follows the same standards, the code becomes much easier to read, review, and debug. This saves a ton of time for everyone involved.
Imagine if everyone in a group project had to write a report, but no one agreed on the same font, text size, or layout. The final product would look messy, and you’d have to spend hours reformatting it. Coding without standards is basically the same thing. With coding standards, everything looks clean and organized from the start, and that makes things way easier for everyone.
During my internship, I saw how much coding standards actually matter in the real world. The team I worked with followed strict guidelines to make sure the code was consistent, maintainable, and easy to scale. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but after seeing how it played out in a real development environment, I realized why it’s so important.
When you have hundreds of people working on the same project, coding standards become essential. Without them, every developer would write their code differently, and it would be nearly impossible to maintain. But with a set of clear rules, the code stays clean and consistent, making it easier to review, debug, and extend. I also noticed that following coding standards helped prevent bugs. When the whole team follows best practices, it’s less likely that one person’s bad habit will introduce an error that breaks the whole system.
In one of my software engineering classes, we were introduced to a tool called ESLint. ESLint is a tool that helps enforce coding standards for JavaScript and TypeScript projects. It automatically checks your code for errors and tells you if you’re not following best practices. At first, using ESLint was frustrating. Every time I ran the lint checker, it would flood me with errors. Most of them seemed small, like indentation problems, missing spaces, or variable names not matching the expected format. It felt tedious and unnecessary since I was the only one working on my code.
At first, I didn’t understand why we had to follow these rules. But my professor explained that the goal was to give us experience with tools like ESLint, which are used in real-world projects. After a while, I started to see the bigger picture. Once I got used to writing my code in a way that followed the rules, I noticed that my workflow became smoother. I wasn’t constantly going back to fix tiny issues, and my code looked cleaner and more consistent.
The true value of coding standards becomes clear when you look at how large companies handle software development. If you have a team of 100 developers all working on the same project, there’s no way you can let everyone write code in their own unique style. It would be impossible to maintain, and the code would be full of errors and inconsistencies. Coding standards solve this problem. Everyone follows the same rules, which makes it easier to maintain, scale, and debug the project.
This is why large organizations rely on tools like ESLint and enforce coding standards across their teams. It’s not just to be strict—it’s to make sure the project stays organized and efficient. At first, students might think coding standards are just extra work, but once they work on bigger projects with other people, they’ll understand why it’s so important. Following coding standards makes collaboration smoother, and it reduces the chance of introducing bugs or breaking existing features.
At first, I thought coding standards were just about making sure my code looked “pretty” before I turned it in. But after gaining industry experience and learning how large teams operate, I see that coding standards are much more than that. They keep projects consistent, reduce errors, and make collaboration much easier.
Using tools like ESLint might feel annoying at first, but once you get used to it, it actually makes your work easier. It helps you develop good habits and write cleaner, more maintainable code. I’ve come to appreciate coding standards, and I know they’ll play a big role in my future as a software engineer.