>One common thing I’ve seen, which I consider very sloppy, is that a circuit can still be made up of common topologies, but the designer didn’t put a lot of effort into making them look like their textbook versions; they realize “I need 4 resistors, a transistor, and a diode”, plop those down, and then draw wandering connections between them. It’s still correct and functional, but not very ergonomic for the user
Very true. This is exactly like spaghetti code and very hard to make sense of for somebody lacking experience.
My “one trick” though is that I have a drawer full of different coloured highlighters. When I encounter a “badly drawn” schematic, I pull out the highlighters and start colouring the nodes in the circuit and working through what functions each part may serve. One common thing I’ve seen, which I consider very sloppy, is that a circuit can still be made up of common topologies, but the designer didn’t put a lot of effort into making them look like their textbook versions; they realize “I need 4 resistors, a transistor, and a diode”, plop those down, and then draw wandering connections between them. It’s still correct and functional, but not very ergonomic for the user. Sometimes the parts are a long way from each other with big long nets drawn between them (or worse! Labelled nets that don’t actually draw a full line)
And writing all of this, I’ve realized that it’s exactly the same as code. High cohesion and loose coupling and all that :)