“The Clean Coder” is a book for professional programmers (says the subtitle) so the first chapter is about professionalism as a software developer.

There are 3 main characteristics in Uncle Bob vision of professionalism.

The first one is about taking responsability : if you want to be considered as a professional developer you have to take care of your work and especially your bugs. You can choose to test your code or not but you have to face the consequences of your choices. You cannot be perfect by producing zero bugs but you are still responsible for your imperfections.

The second part is named “Do not harm“, do not harm your functions nor your structure. In other words it means that you should test your system and its functionalities to be sure that the behavior of these is not altered. And the structure of your system should stay highly flexible, this way you don’t have to break everything in order to apply some changes.

The third and last characteristic is about work ethic. Uncle Bob expects that a professional programmer has to work from home several hours a week. But this work is not for you employer, this work is for your career. In our field the technologies evolve quickly and continuous learning is essential to avoid becoming obsolete. We have to stay sharp !
But keep in mind that this work should stay fun and you can learn whatever you want, you are not forced to learn for your employers, learn for yourself.

To sum up a professional is responsible for what he produces and should practice its craft.

See you next time for “Saying No” !