Do you keep them in your IDE, or elsewhere? Do you have an app for that? Are they easily shared?
I realized I have no system at all but could use one to make it easier to find code I’ve written and might need again some day.
By snippets, I am referring to any chunk of code / text in any format or language, of any length.
Thanks!
EDIT A DAY LATER: Thanks you all! Reading all these ideas, I got inspired to create my own little web app. Wish me luck… :)
I create proper libraries. I don’t do snippets because they make code dirty, redundant and difficult to read on the long run.
I actively discourage people in my team to use snippets copy and pasted everywhere themselves. If it’s reusable code, it should be usable by everyone and well tested
The only case I use snippets for is for debug code that I use often. Sometimes there are things I find myself doing a lot for debugging that don’t have any reason to be in code (e.g. nicely formatting certain objects for debug purposes)
Write a function or macro so you can reuse them. The project I work on has dozens of debug assisting code paths. Here are two examples: normally when talking to the db you’ll call
run($sql, $boundVariables)on a handle. Alternatively you can calldebug($sql, $boundVariables)to have the handle run the query normally then rerun the query prefixed withEXPLAIN (blah,blah)to get the execution plan. We also haveassembleEmulatedQuery($sql, $boundVariables)which will manually replace all the binding tokens in the SQL with their values, do some string escaping and return a big honking string that you can dump into the database… that last one is useful for performance tuning since it can be used to easily capture expensive query forms. Also - assembleEmulatedQuery will throw an exception on our production environment because it’s unsafe due to the potential of SQL Injection.Build debugging functions and add tests over them - future you will thank you!