Repeating yourself? Wait! You could avoid the repetition.

In software development, there is this term Don’t repeat yourself. There are many posts which talk about it and terms like DRY, DRYness, WET, “write everything twice”, “we enjoy typing” or “waste everyone’s time”, and so on.

When you are repeating yourself, it’s a clue, an opportunity for you to do something about this repetition.

I’ll walk you through some of the examples.

As a developer, the first thing I was doing every morning was open the visual studio, get the latest code from TFS, build the dependencies (dependent projects), copy dll’s to the shared folder and build the main web project. I was doing this action daily in the morning. I saw I could have automated the process.

It was a clue! I created a bat file. The bat file was doing the above repetitive actions for me as soon as I start my computer.

In your case, it could be something else. It could get latest code from git, docker up, build containers and so on. Are you repeating yourself?

Whenever you see you are copying and pasting the bunch of HTML and CSS code to display a notification message. Just stop there! think about reusable HTML components, extract it and use it everywhere. Write once and use everywhere.

Whenever you see you are repeating the code to download CSV on multiple pages, then think about extracting it to a class, CsvContentGenerator? CsvDownloader?

Whenever you see you are repeating inline calculation?

 
if((totalStudentInClass - studentPresentInClass)>0){
    var message = "There are {totalStudentInClass - studentPresentInClass} absent students in the class";
}

Consider extracting it to a method or a variable.

var absentStudentsCount = totalStudentInClass - studentPresentInClass; 
if(absentStudentsCount>0){
   var message = "There are {absentStudentsCount} absent students in the class";
}

Whenever you see you are copying an email sending code from one project to another, consider writing a shared library.

Whenever you see you are repeatedly writing the validation messages in translation files. Consider writing the generic message in translation file and fill specific field name at runtime.

Check the support for it in your translation framework.

"EmailIsRequired": "Email is required".
"UsernameIsRequired": "Username is required".
"NameIsRequired": "Name is required".

// Instead of repeating, create generic message and 
// fill template-placeholder %{fieldName} with actual field name.
"FieldIsRequired": "%{fieldName} is required"

Whenever you see you are creating padding and margin styles and your app.css is growing.
Consider writing SCSS helpers, https://gist.github.com/jacurtis/30da4bf9a6c9b9b5cc0aebac512ca7c9.

Whenever you see you are writing repetitive if/switch case to decide and create a specific instance of a class. Consider using abstract factory pattern which decides and create the specific instance of a class for you.

We don’t know everything. It’s okay.

Whenever you see you are repeating something, I want you to stop there, think about it, there will be a clean solution. This could save your future time and code could be more maintainable.

In the software development field, patterns, practices, refactoring techniques and many more other techniques are already there to avoid repetition, use it.

You must be using the combination of key Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V million times a day. Next time when you press this combination, I want you to think about avoiding the repetition and ask yourself. Oh! wait! Can I do something about it? Can I automate this? Can I extract this logic to the method, classes, reusable CSS, js components, library and so on?