The purpose of this repository is to establish baseline standards for developing web projects at Boston University.
New web team employees should review these documents prior to committing any code to our code base.
Be consistent.
The point of having style guidelines is to have a common vocabulary of coding so people can concentrate on what you’re saying rather than on how you’re saying it. We present global style rules here so people know the vocabulary, but local style is also important. If code you add to a file looks drastically different from the existing code around it, it throws readers out of their rhythm when they go to read it. Avoid this.
If you’re editing code, take a few minutes to look at the code around you and determine its style. If they use spaces around all their arithmetic operators, you should too. If their comments have little boxes of hash marks around them, make your comments have little boxes of hash marks around them too.
"Parting Words", Google style guide
Coding standards are only useful if they are followed.
Currently we have no tooling in place to enforce these standards. While an automated process that reviewed commits for coding style and reported violations is possible, we're not quite there yet.
In the meantime there are several tools that can be installed locally to ensure you're writing code that conforms with these standards. Language-specific tools will be documented within their respsective guides.
Have a recommendation? Create a branch and submit a pull request!
Github pull requests are well-suited for this; opening a pull request creates a dedicated page for comments, and notifies all repostiory watchers.