Just today, I welcomed a new co-worker to my organisation. Until now, I’ve been the only C++ guy in the place, but this person is also a C++ dev, and will be working with me on a component that I’ve been building since the beginning of the year.

So today we’ve been getting to know each other, and talking through the project, and it’s going well… but what’s really surprised me is how many – totally arbitrary things – on which we happen to agree… like coding convention.

Where style isn’t prescribed by a language (e.g. indenting in python) you can usually be sure that there are as many conventions out there as there are developers. My own C++ coding style has changed over the years, and right at the start of this project, I decided (for the first time) to simply follow the same style as the standard library and Boost (i.e. all lower-case, snake-case names, and so on). Funnily enough, most big libraries I’ve used don’t do this (Qt, MFC, etc. – Boost seems to be the exception, maybe because it’s so close to the standard).

I’m generally used to arguing with people about stuff like this, or putting up with other people’s styles (which is fine, btw – it doesn’t really matter)… so it almost came as something as a shock to me when I spoke about this whole “copy the standard” thing I’m using, and to have my new workmate fist-pump the air and go “Yes!”

I think we’ll get along fine. 🙂