4. The Best Coding Standard Is the One Your Whole Team Follows

When I started as a senior developer at a new company in 2008, something immediately stood out: the developers were incredibly skilled and delivered beautiful projects—but everyone had their own unique way of working. This led to challenging collaboration, slow progress, and difficulties when adding extra developers to ongoing projects.

🚩 The Problem

There were multiple technical solutions for the same problems, and it was unclear who mastered which tools. Knowledge became fragmented, making projects difficult to scale.

🚀 My Approach

I decided to make a change. I mapped out all the tools and frameworks we were using and quickly discovered a lot of overlap. Together with the team, I developed the company's first coding standard. We agreed on the frameworks and tools everyone would use and committed to this standard as a team.

The Result: the impact was significant

• ✅ Better collaboration: Developers could easily support each other's projects.
• ✅ Faster knowledge growth: The team's expertise grew rapidly because everyone used the same tools.
• ✅ Higher quality: Projects were completed better and faster, and we even won several awards for our work.
• ✅ Easier scaling: Even as we expanded to new offices in other countries, collaboration remained seamless thanks to our uniform coding standard.

But not everyone followed the standard… 🤔

📌 Lesson Learned

One day, a new team at a new location got a challenging project with a tight deadline. Against my advice, they decided not to follow the coding standard, thinking it would save them time. The opposite happened:

• ❌ The project got stuck, and extra help from other teams became difficult.
• ❌ Deviation from the standard created confusion and inefficiency.

This experience reinforced what I already knew: a coding standard only works if everyone commits to it.

🔑 My Advice

Agree on a standard with your team and make sure everyone commits to it. But remember—a good coding standard must stay flexible:

💡 Our standard was public and open to change. We used GitHub, where developers could propose improvements through pull requests. If these received enough votes, they were implemented. This approach didn't just improve engagement—it also kept our standards current with new frameworks and techniques.

"The best coding standard is the one your whole team follows."

So ask yourself: does your team have a solid coding standard, or is everyone doing their own thing?

Need help setting up or implementing coding standards? Feel free to reach out—I'm happy to help! 🤝

📌 This is part of my weekly series, Developers Tiles of Wisdom. Follow me for more insights on writing better code and building better teams.