I usually cuddle in my code, my opening "{" is always in the same line. This is not a trivial decision: Linux vs Windows, Vi vs Emacs, you know, the
Holy Wars of the geeks. Choose one side and
fight for it till your last drop of Coke.
But it turns that when you are a freelance chances are you are going to find a company that does the opposite as you do. If you cuddle, they don't. If you leave spaces around ifs, fors and parameters, they don't. If you organize your classes like
public vars+private vars+public methods+private methods, they organize them like
getters/setters+public methods+private methods+private vars+public vars. If you use FlashDevelop, they use TextMate (why would anybody want to use TextMate? Yes, another
Mac phobia).
Now you are in trouble. You want to keep your coding standards because you love them very much. Not only that, you've been
bitching about them and you know you are RIGHT. On the other hand, however, you are a freelance (in the company for a short time),
they are paying you and, specially, you have to respect the
elders.
Luckily for me, I'm the Groucho Marx of the coding standards:
these are my principles, and if you don't like them... I have others. You cuddle? I cuddle. You leave spaces around ifs? I leave spaces around ifs. You use TextMate? Whatever, I'll use TextMate. It really isn't such a big deal for me. It takes me around 1 day to start feeling comfortable so the adopted standards somehow flow. Heck, I even use several standards in the same day: one in the office (the adopted) and another one in the train while coming back home doing my own stuff.
On top of that I use several keyboard layouts. Now in the office I use an English Mac keyboard on a Windows machine. On the train I use a Spanish Dell laptop keyboard and at home I use a Spanish Mac keyboard on a Linux machine. Despite the occasional mistake, I type relatively fast without looking too much. Is the brain flexible or what?
Anyway, coming back to the coding standards, there're only 2 things I can't stand:
1) The lack of free space. For the love of GOD, leave at least one blank line between functions. Remember:
blank lines are free.
2) Inconsistent tabulation.
You kidding me? You want to me understand *that* thing you call code? That's not spaghetti code, that's just a bloody mess of instructions to the compiler, I'm surprised any human being or machine makes sense of that.
Anything else I can deal with, but those 2 are my kryptonite, I feel dizzy and weak around them.