Just realized I was blocking my own progress after a Reddit comment told me to stop over-explaining in code comments

Some random dev told me my comments read like a diary entry and after I cut them down to just the 'why' instead of the 'what', my PRs actually stopped getting flagged for review every single time.

3 comments

3 Comments

tyler17615d ago

Did you notice your diffs getting way smaller too? Once I stopped writing novels in my comments, my PRs went from 200 lines of actual code to like 40 and nobody had anything to nitpick anymore. It's wild how much cleaner everything looks when you trust the code to speak for itself.

mia_singh2414d ago

200 lines down to 40? That's insane. I would've thought getting rid of comments would make things longer, not shorter. But I guess if you're not explaining every single line of code, you're probably writing cleaner code in the first place. It makes sense though - if your code needs a novel to explain it, something is probably wrong from the start. The less you write, the more you're forced to keep it simple and readable.

river_scott14d ago

@tyler176 but sometimes a little context in the comments saves everyone from guessing why you did something weird ten months from now.