Coding with empathy

If your project does not follow these guidelines, be sure to describe the reasons in the readme, and provide as much context and guidance as possible.

Principles

• you are coding for the people you work with (including future you)
• the less we need to know to be useful, the more we can do

Recommendations

• prefer programming languages and frameworks that are commonly used at the Guardian
  • this will optimise our projects for Guardian engineers
• prefer idiomatic patterns and techniques
  • this will optimise our code for people who are already familiar with the language it is written in
• prefer simplicity over sophistication
  • this will optimise our code for the next reader
• defer to the principle of least surprise
  • our code should make the reader feel capable rather than out of their depth