##What are standards? Coding Standards mean different things to everyone, but to me they mean comments. The most important thing to me as a developer is to make sure that someone else can do my job - after all, if you’re irreplaceable, you can’t move up. There’s also general consideration to those who might build on and use your code. Black boxes (code which is indecipherable to the user) are inherently competition-driven. I prefer the open source option, where everyone can use and improve on code, such that everyone is benefited.
IntelliJ Idea has helped me considerably with certain aspects of coding, particularly with finding the simple little things. A misplaced semicolon or badly moved div tag would normally be an irritation of several minutes but with a competent IDE it’s just a flag in the sidebar, easily fixed.
I keep myself to a high level of coding standards primarily for my own benefit, but with the knowledge that it’ll also help those who come after me. Looking back at old code that you wrote is nearly as impenetrable as completely foreign work if you don’t stick to a high level of readability and organization. Therefore, in order to learn from past mistakes and avoid re-inventing the wheel, I need to be able to decipher my work.