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Quite possibly one of the most important things you need to keep in mind when working on a larger coding project is to stay organized. Organization can either make or break your project, so I’ve decided to share a few tips I use to try and keep organized.

Indentation
Although to many it is an obvious thing to do, there is far too much code out there that doesn’t use indentation at all or correctly. It is very easy to make a long script in notepad with absolutely no indentation, however, one of the most common mistakes you can make while coding is forgetting to close a brace (curly bracket; { }), and this is only made easier by not indenting your code. Indenting allows you to see all the layers in your code much more easily, producing much nicer looking code, not to mention being a lot easier to read.
Here is an example of how you can best use indentation in your code

statement ( condition )
{
//One indentation in
statement ( condition )
{
//Two indentations in
}//Close a layer
statement ( condition )
{
//Into another layer
}//Close it
}//Close the original layer
Commenting
Another very important habit you should have with your coding is always commenting what you’re doing. It helps you find where something occurs in the script, why that might be occurring, as well as telling anyone else reading your script what you were trying to accomplish. This makes it easier to debug things, as well as get help with your scripts. I generally comment to signify new sections of code, what some more confusing functions are doing, what variables are for, etc.

Variable names
It is also very important that your variables are well named. Knowing how to name variables descriptively yet in just a few characters is a very great skill to have in my opinion, and is unfortunately one I’m not the greatest at (ha ha). You want to be able to communicate to whoever is reading the script what that variable does as well as anything else you want associated to it such as the data type (int, txt, etc.), or some other classification you deem useful for your particular script. I also find it very helpful to capitalize separate words or abbreviations in your variable names (or any other names for that matter) to give you results like intYear or txtMessage.

Arrays are your friend!
This is almost a continuation of the variables section, however I thought it was important enough to have it’s own section. Arrays are not only for storing common array data such as rows of a table. They can be used to your advantage for common use variables that you want to be associated in some way. You could use it the same way as variables by storing more information in just the name. Say for example you had some key numerical values that were used throughout your script; you could use the array num[] or whatever you want then store your data in parts of the array: num[’varKey’] = 129837981. It also lets you classify your variables in a little more detail so you could have the same name for more than one value like: my[’name’] and your[’name’].

Follow some sort of protocol
In general your script should all be structured similarly. You should have a set method for most things like where you put your comments, (above, after, before, below, whatever you want), how far you indent (tabs or a number of spaces), how you put your braces for statements (same line or next line usually), and any other little thing that you probably do habitually anyway without noticing it. Whatever you do though, you should keep it all the same so you can keep everything looking neat and tidy!