Chris Coyier’s Make it hard to screw up driven development struck a chord with me. If there’s ever going to be more than one of you working on a codebase, having a style guide for your CSS or SASS or Javascript or whatever makes sense. Having it automatically applied when you hit save means you rarely have to worry about adhering to the style – it just happens for you. I’ve yet to have one of these tools break my code, either.

One thing Chris didn’t mention though was running a spellchecker over your code. It may sound completely bananas, but hear me out. Firstly, it’s a code-specific spell checker. Secondly, I’ve worked on projects before where we’ve ended up with 3 different spellings of the word “palette”, because 3 different people assumed they had it right. It also means you’re implicitly being encouraged to give your variables and CSS classes meaningful names, so when you revisit the code in the future it’ll make a bit more sense. We used cSpell to do this, but I’m sure other similar products are available.

These tools don’t just exist in the development tools, either. We have them set up in our CI environment, so you can’t merge a code change unless it passes all of the tests – and the tests include both spell checking and matching the style guide. The system won’t let you screw these particular things up – leaving you free to concentrate on not screwing up the actual logic.

I’m a big fan of working this way, in case it wasn’t obvious.