For awhile there, I was “the second opinion” if you outsourced a project. You’d hire people like me to tell you if it really would take 100 man hours to make photo uploads faster, or did they really patch a security issue, etc. It was pretty neat to read so much closed source code. But more than once, the developer would send obfuscated code and claim that it was how they worked on it. Only once did someone say, “oops, here’s the right version”.

Those projects taught me how important naming is, more than anything. Some people like to say that you don’t need names.

I’ll be the first to say that they’re probably right (considering the code executes) but damn does it make life easier when things are named well... and less expensive for everyone.