Lab Coding Guidelines

Below are our coding guidelines. These standards are designed to ensure that our code is clean, maintainable, and reproducible.

Code Quality

Consistency

• Follow a consistent code style throughout the project.
• Use a linter to enforce style rules and catch potential issues early.
• Adopt a widely accepted naming convention for variables and functions.

Naming Conventions

• Use meaningful and descriptive names for variables, functions, and classes.
• For variables and functions, use lower_case_with_underscores.
• For classes, use CamelCase.
• Avoid abbreviations and single-character names when appropriate, except for very short-lived local variables.
• Constants should be written in UPPER_CASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES.

Documentation

• Document your code thoroughly using comments and docstrings.
• Include a README file in your project with a brief description, installation instructions, and usage examples.
• Provide inline comments to explain complex or non-obvious code segments.

Readability

• Write clear and understandable code.
• Break down large functions into smaller, more manageable pieces.
• Avoid using “magic numbers” and hard-coded values; use constants or configuration files instead.

Version Control

Git Usage

• Use Git for version control.
• Make regular commits with clear, descriptive messages.
• Use branches to work on new features or bug fixes, and merge them into the main branch once they are stable.

Collaboration

• Conduct code reviews for all pull requests.
• Provide constructive feedback and suggestions during reviews.
• Ensure that code changes are peer-reviewed before merging.

Deployment

Environment Management

• Use virtual environments to manage dependencies.
• Document the setup process for the development environment.
• Ensure that the production environment mirrors the development environment as closely as possible.

Integration

• Ensure that all tests pass before code is merged into the main branch.
• Consider using a continuous integration (CI) pipeline to automate testing and deployment.

Security

Secure Coding Practices

• Avoid storing sensitive information in the codebase; use environment variables instead.
• Clear all intermediate outputs and sensitive data before sharing or committing code to public platforms like GitHub.

Access Control

• Limit access to the code repository to authorized personnel only.
• Use role-based access control to manage permissions.

Maintenance

Code Refactoring

• Regularly review and refactor code to improve quality and performance.
• Remove dead code and unused dependencies.

By following these guidelines, we can maintain high standards of code quality and ensure that our projects are successful and sustainable. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding these guidelines, please feel free to discuss them with the team.