The Cost-Saving Development Series: Linting 🚀
Software development is an investment — it costs time, effort, and resources to build a product that generates revenue. To maximize profit, businesses aim for higher sales and lower development costs.
Let’s leave the sales part to business professionals who dedicate their careers to making that happen. But as software engineers, our role is to minimize development costs — not by cutting essential expenses, but by developing features, enhancing productivity, and reducing waste
Reducing waste means removing blockers so engineers can work efficiently. There are many ways to improve development speed, and today, I want to talk about linting (static code analysis) — a simple yet powerful tool that our first step of cost-saving development.
How Does Linting Save Costs? đź’°
Imagine you have 4–5 developers, each with their own coding style. One day, a team member goes on vacation or leaves the project, and another developer has to pick up their work.
Code is like a language — without a consistent “grammar”, reading and maintaining someone else’s code becomes time-consuming and prone to error. If the new developer struggles to understand the code, it leads to slow progress and even new bugs, which then require additional time to fix.
That extra time? It’s pure waste. So I can say that anything that make developers work faster, less error. It’s our goal for this series.
Even if you’re working solo today, think about tomorrow. Can you really be sure your project will never grow to need a team? Implementing linting from the start keeps your codebase clean and maintainable, setting you up for smooth scaling in the future. Linting in Dart 🚀
Linting enforces a standardized set of rules for your code, helping to maintain consistency and readability. Both are key to enabling software developers to work faster and with fewer errors. In the Dart ecosystem, some of the most popular linting packages include:
• flutter_lints (officially supported by the Flutter team)
• lint
• very_good_analysis
• dart_code_metrics
• dart_code_linter
I personally use flutter_lints and dart_code_linter for my projects. https://pub.dev/packages/dart_code_linter
Final Thoughts
Linting might seem like a minor detail, but its impact is huge. By reducing waste, improving productivity, and ensuring smoother development, linting ultimately cuts down costs over time. Whether you’re coding solo or working within a team, integrating a linting tool into your workflow is a smart and simple investment.
Give it a try — start coding with less waste 🚀🔥
Follow this series on Flutter Mekong — where we share real-world experiences so that no one has to repeat the same mistakes.
