I was at a hackathon in Phoenix and it totally changed how I start projects

I was trying to build a simple weather app and spent the first 4 hours just setting up my project folder and picking colors. A mentor walked by, looked at my screen, and said, 'You're building a cathedral before you've even dug the hole.' He told me to just write the core function that fetches the weather data first, in a plain text file, and get it working. I did that in 20 minutes and had a working script by lunch. Now I always code the main thing in a simple file before I touch anything else. Has anyone else found a better way to stop over-planning at the start?

4 comments

4 Comments

paige1662mo ago

Remember getting stuck for a whole day trying to pick the PERFECT database for a tiny blog. My friend finally said to just write the posts in a JSON file and get the site showing them. Had a basic reader up in an hour. That fake data file is STILL there, two years later. Sometimes you just need to make the thing talk before you build its house.

phoenixk642mo ago

That JSON file will be a nightmare at 10,000 posts.

wade_kelly775d ago

Counterpoint: JSON handles 10k entries fine! I've got a config file at work that's pushing 15k lines with nested objects and it loads in under a second. The real nightmare is when you try to query it like a real database - filtering, sorting, doing joins across files. But if you're just reading the whole thing into memory and looping through it for a simple blog? That's totally doable. I'd be more worried about the editor getting laggy when you scroll through 10k lines than the actual performance. File size wise we're talking maybe 2-3 megabytes, that's nothing.

jameswells2mo ago

Man, @paige166, my first "database" was a text file I just kept adding lines to...