In this chapter, we've explored the vital tenets of reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and usability. Using these tenets as lenses through which we can look at our code bases ensures that we will be far more likely to write cleaner code. One of the most important things we've learned in this chapter is always to consider the human in the code we write. The user may be a human sitting on the other side of a GUI or a fellow programmer making use of our APIs. Either way, being constantly aware of this human is vital.
In the next chapter, we'll continue the theme of studying the underlying characteristics of clean code by looking at the enemies to be aware of, such as cargo-cult programming and ego.