Code has a strong dependency on context. It is not understandable without a context. Hence reading code is much harder than writing it. More often than not, th

Code has a strong dependency on context. It is not understandable without a context. Hence reading code is much harder than writing it. More often than not, that context is something you need to guess - by reading the code - and then establish the context. Often it's a best guess because the author did not explicitly document the mental and required technical context by which the software was written. In terms of coding standards and diverging designs, as other people has mentioned, this comes down to both tooling and leadership. It's an integrity question really; Do you wish to write software that other people understand ? It's a pretty established fact that the brain only have so much cognitive ability, so by writing software that the brain can absorb is of course key. One way of doing this is writing small and well documented context-based code. I highly recommend that if you are in a team, set up ruleset for how things should be and have your tool to enforce it. Class lenghts, spaces, variable names, null reference checks etc. It's easy to be a lone developer. Everyone can write code. If you can get someone else to understand it while reading it, you're one step closer being a really good developer!