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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?
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paige1665mo 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.
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phoenixk645mo ago
That JSON file will be a nightmare at 10,000 posts.
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wade_kelly773mo 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.
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jameswells5mo ago
Man, @paige166, my first "database" was a text file I just kept adding lines to...
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