Item 23: Personify your Code
To personify is to give life to otherwise inanimate objects. When thinking about building complex codebases, it can be hard to know where to begin, even to know how to get started thinking about the solution you're setting out to ] build. One of the things I do to get around this is I ask myself if people, not code, were carrying out the solution I'm coding up, how would I describe what they were doing? I call this personifying my code.
When you initially write your code, think about how you yourself would solve the problem as a human being. Then, try and translate that solution into code, using the same abstractions you thought of in your head.
Here's an example: say you're building a UI for managing massive amounts of data, and your stakeholders have expressed that the reason why they are still exporting the data out of your app and into Excel is because they use a lot of custom formulas on the data, and can't figure out how to replicate that in your UI. Thus, your PM queues up a task to add excel-like formulas to your data processing product.
Where do you even begin? Well, what you could do is start thinking about how you understand an excel-like formula when you see it. First, you'll obviously need an example, since as we saw in Item 2, the concrete is always easier to grasp then the abstract. So your PM gives you one:
COUNTIF(price, ">50") / COUNT(price)
Before writing any code, think about how you as a human being understand what you are seeing here. The first thing I notice is that I see my mind breaking that string of characters into a bunch of different components, namely:
COUNTIF(price, ">50")/COUNT(price)
Which I interpret in my head to mean, ...blah blah blah keep going with this.
The key here is to be systematic with your thinking. You want to begin to think structurally about the messy ambiguous solution given to you, and start to form structure by understanding the solution thoroughly and communicating that understanding through code
Another key benefit of personifying your code is that it will help give you a common, easy-to-use language to discuss implementation with your teams and your stakeholders. Everybody can relate to narratives around humans, it's the most human thing.