Code Formatting Standards: Industry Best Practices

A codebase is read far more often than it is written. If your team spent hours arguing about tabs vs. spaces or trailing commas in a pull request, you're losing valuable engineering time. Standards exist to eliminate those arguments.

1. The "Prettier" Revolution

In the past, we had long documents explaining our style. Today, we have auto-formatters. Tools like Prettier have become the standard because they are opinionated. By adopting a tool that formats your code on every save, you ensure that every file looks like it was written by the same person.

2. Why Limit Line Length?

The 80-character limit is a relic of terminal screens, but modern standards (100 or 120 chars) serve a physiological purpose: Human eyes have difficulty tracking long lines of horizontal text. Shorter lines make code easier to scan.

3. Meaningful Vertical Whitespace

Whitespace is the "breathing room" of your code. You should group related lines together and use a single newline to separate different logical blocks. Too much whitespace is as bad as too little; it forces the reader to scroll more than necessary.

4. Consistent Naming Conventions

Whether you use camelCase for variables, PascalCase for classes, or snake_case for database columns—the key is consistency. Mixed casing is a clear signal of poor code quality and can lead to bugs in case-sensitive environments.

5. Automate with Husky and Lint-Staged

Standards only work if they are enforced. Use git hooks to prevent any code from being committed that doesn't meet your project's formatting and linting standards.