Why Clear Variable Naming Is for Professionals

I was digging into a new client’s WooCommerce site last week. They had a custom filtering system for product certifications—think ‘Organic’, ‘Fair Trade’, that kind of thing. But it was buggy as hell. Simple filtering was timing out. The previous developer’s code was a maze of variables like $p_meta, $cert_arr, and functions called get_stuff(). It took me longer to figure out what the code was supposed to be doing than to actually fix the bug. Total mess.

This is where the conversation about clear variable naming isn’t just academic. It’s practical. It’s the difference between a five-minute fix and a two-hour archeological dig through someone else’s brain droppings. Bad naming costs clients real money.

Your Code Should Tell a Story

My first impulse was to just patch the broken logic. Find the one conditional that was causing the timeout, fix it, and move on. And yeah, that would have worked. For now. But I’d be leaving a time bomb for the next developer. Or worse, for future me six months from now.

The real problem wasn’t the bug; it was the ambiguity. What was in $cert_arr? An array of post IDs? Term objects? A mix? The name tells you nothing. Trust me on this, you can’t rely on comments to save you. More often than not, comments are either wrong, outdated, or just state the obvious. The code itself should be the source of truth.

// What does this even do?
function process_data($data, $type) {
    $results = [];
    foreach ($data as $d) {
        if ($d->status == 'active' && $d->type === $type) {
            $results[] = $d->id;
        }
    }
    return $results;
}

// Ah, that's much clearer.
function get_active_product_ids_by_certification($products, $certification_slug) {
    $matching_product_ids = [];
    foreach ($products as $product) {
        if ($product->post_status == 'publish' && has_term($certification_slug, 'p_certification', $product->ID)) {
            $matching_product_ids[] = $product->ID;
        }
    }
    return $matching_product_ids;
}

See the difference? The second function doesn’t need a comment. You know exactly what it does just by reading the function name and the variables inside it. It’s self-documenting. This is what professionals do. We write code for humans first, computers second. This whole idea builds on a concept I first read about years ago over at carlalexander.ca, where the author discusses creating a “ubiquitous language” that everyone on a project can understand.

So, What’s the Real Takeaway?

It’s not just about following some arbitrary style guide. It’s about empathy. You’re writing code that other people have to read, debug, and maintain. Don’t make their job harder just to save yourself a few seconds of typing. Naming things properly is a sign of a senior developer who respects their colleagues and their clients’ time. Period.

• Name variables and functions for what they are or do. Be explicit.
• Avoid abbreviations. Is $cat a category, a catalog, or a feline? Don’t make people guess.
• If a function is hard to name, it’s probably doing too much. Break it down.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.