As part of my role as a developer I attend code reviews. On more than one occasion I’ve been struck by small details that have made a big difference.

A colleague once pointed out that I was giving myself an opportunity to get code wrong by missing out the braces in an if statement. In most C style languages, (C++, C#, Javascript etc) this is legal

if (someCondition)
    performSomeAction();

However he asserted it was unwise to rely on indentation to indicate that the performSomeAction method will be called, its all to easy to add another indented statement or a semicolon to completely change the meaning. Consider these

if (someCondition);
    performSomeAction();

and

if (someCondition)
    performAnotherAction();
    performSomeAction();

He said that its only a few extra characters to change the code to this

if (someCondition)
{
    performSomeAction();
}

As a result I do try to always resist the shortcut of missing the braces out, I know that unit testing and advances in compilers can help but there are enough ways of getting bugs into code why look for another?