In the last few years, I have visited London and Frankfurt. Both are Huge urban zones, with London being the largest urban zone in Europe. In both cities I had to use the metro (or subway, or whatever you want to call it) to get from the airport to the city center and vice versa.

When I first sat foot in Frankfurt, I saw a railway map similar to the one below:

Ouch! What a fucking mess! I said to myself. What do all those icons mean ? And why are some places written sideways ? How am I supposed to turn my head when I’m looking for something ? And how do I get back to the airport once I get to the city center ?

I asked some people in the airport and finally found my way around. But once I got in the city center, I had trouble getting back resulting in one hour lost. Of course it was not a pleasant experience and this coupled with the ultra-dirty trains, have placed Frankfurt quite low in my list of future destinations.

A couple of years later I visited London which is at least two times larger than Frankfurt. I was expecting, given the size of the city, that I would have an even hardest time moving around. To my surprise, when I landed in Heathrow I saw this, outside the train station:

What an improvement! Everything written horizontally, all lines clearly visible and an amazing index in the bottom left with anything I needed to know. They even have small red airplanes next to all stations that can take you back to the airport. How cool!

Needless to say, I had no problem whatsoever finding my way around London, wasting zero time, and without having to ask around.

Now back to the real world…

Earlier today I had to ask one of my team members to rename some database tables according to our boring convention of plugin_table_name. So since the arrangement_types table is obvious that contains arrangement types, it had to be renamed to arrangement_arrangement_types.

Duh! What meaningless convention you may think. Rest assured it is not. When you want to export all database tables belonging to a certain plugin, or when you want to make a list of each plugin’s tables, to create an upgrade procedure it pays off.

Remember that one hour I lost in Frankfurt ? Every time you break a convention, you lose one hour some time in the future and you destroy your coding experience. Maybe even more if you consider that it’s a journey that you will repeat many more times.