I’m starting an open-source Wiki on GitHub for coding standards/best practices. The built-in Markdown compatibility and Git versioning make it an ideal place for such a project, as well as the wide adoption of GitHub itself by open-source programmers. If you search for “coding standards” on GitHub, there are only a few repositories, and they are pretty much project-specific, so it’s a wide-open “market” of sorts.
In the past I’ve curated standards docs for companies in which we sort of merged the IDesign docs with the Microsoft API Guidelines. But that was an internal document for one particular company. I’m hoping this open-source version will be more of a living document, with much broader application as it should be of interest to all kinds of people who care about making their code well-tuned for collaboration and understanding.
Please share with me your top pet peeves. Maybe we can start something here and have the kind of effect that would help educate people around the world and reduce the frequency of messy spaghetti code!