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Writing Code as Writing Experiments
A Strong Hypothesis Can Improve Your Code
Abbey Perini
August 15, 2025
Writing Code as Writing Experiments
Luciano, writer of the Fullstack Bulletin, recently featured a great article called To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head. It’s got a lot of great tips, but it is heavily math-based.
If you know me, you know my background is not math theory, but it is experiment design theory. So instead of proofs, I’ve been writing hypotheses. I remember being surprised when I found out other people weren’t doing that.
A Strong Hypothesis Can Improve Your Code
To design an experiment, you start with a question.
Will adding an aria-live attribute produce the right amount of announcements for a screen reader user?
Will fixing this typo fix this error?
Does my red border not show on this <p> element because of another border declaration somewhere in my CSS?
Then, you turn that question into a hypothesis, or proposed explanation in a short, clear sentence. Because we’re not looking to gather statistics to measure the relationship between variables, I find my coding hypothesis is usually an if/then (or when/then) statement or direct statement.
If I add aria-live attribute to this <div> , then a screen reader user will get an announcement when the text inside the <div> is updated.
If I change “varaible” to “variable”, then the error will go away.
The red border is not showing up on my <p> element because there is another CSS declaration overriding the red border declaration I just wrote.
A good hypothesis starts with what we know and what we want to find out. It provides a clear way to test it.
To test this, I will add an aria-live attribute to this <div> , turn on a screen reader, and trigger an update to the text inside the <div>. I’ll know it worked if the screen reader announces the new text.
To test this, I can rewrite “varaible” to “variable” and see if the error is gone.
To test this, I’ll use DevTools to toggle off every declaration that could affect my <p> element. I’ll know it worked if I see a red border around my <p> element.
Approaching writing code and troubleshooting this way makes it a lot easier to keep track of what you tried. Like writing proofs, it’ll “hone the kind of logical thinking that will serve you well when working with complex systems.”
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