Hi Bran, once again great video! I like to add one 'method' to make sense of code: tinkering, or as some might describe it: break and manipulate the code until it does silly stuff. Like you would have done with your old radio in the past. Don't turn it on, take it apart! Tinkering in my case would be to give myself intentionally assignments to make the code show whacky, new behaviour: make the interface purple, have lists sort by hex value, or just have it ping a text to the log and start a private conversation with the log-readers. Most of all: make it fun! This is basically how I also learned how to program (at first). Get the code, run in it, change it, run it, make it do weirder, or cooler stuff, run it and finally: throw everything away and start anew. The cool thing about this method is that you'll hit on the fundamental elements first (most of the time), because they will break, or misbehave first and will be most appealing to alter and tinker with. I guess it almost would be worth an entire video. 😎🤗
Thanks Peet, great to hear! And I fully agree, tinkering probably should have a place in this video. I must admit that I do tinkering less during onboarding and more during "I dont know this specific part of the codebase yet". Thanks for the tip, I'll think about how I can turn this into a video, I find it a slightly more chaotic and difficult topic to talk about I guess 🤔. I'm a very structured and methodical person haha!
I've try some UIs and tools to try to follow a repo over time to try to understand the path a project has follow. Not only to understand how the project is made but to apply some guidance to my own, projects. Does any have any good tools for this purpose?
Git (and therefor GitHub) should have an additional way of describing folders and files with a brief explanation instead of the last commit message. In the end all depends on the devs, but I've seen great open source projects with great docs and comments, but all that gets lost in the repo. Maybe git should default to JsDocs instead of commits if recognize them.
That's an interesting idea! But I guess for gitlab and github to be able to implement this, there needs to be a standard, e.g. a new file in the root called folders.md which has a specific structure or something. Is there such a standard that you know of?
I wish I had come across this superb video 5 years back. This is a crux of years of developer experience.
Hi Bran, once again great video! I like to add one 'method' to make sense of code: tinkering, or as some might describe it: break and manipulate the code until it does silly stuff. Like you would have done with your old radio in the past. Don't turn it on, take it apart!
Tinkering in my case would be to give myself intentionally assignments to make the code show whacky, new behaviour: make the interface purple, have lists sort by hex value, or just have it ping a text to the log and start a private conversation with the log-readers. Most of all: make it fun!
This is basically how I also learned how to program (at first). Get the code, run in it, change it, run it, make it do weirder, or cooler stuff, run it and finally: throw everything away and start anew. The cool thing about this method is that you'll hit on the fundamental elements first (most of the time), because they will break, or misbehave first and will be most appealing to alter and tinker with. I guess it almost would be worth an entire video. 😎🤗
Thanks Peet, great to hear! And I fully agree, tinkering probably should have a place in this video. I must admit that I do tinkering less during onboarding and more during "I dont know this specific part of the codebase yet". Thanks for the tip, I'll think about how I can turn this into a video, I find it a slightly more chaotic and difficult topic to talk about I guess 🤔. I'm a very structured and methodical person haha!
I've try some UIs and tools to try to follow a repo over time to try to understand the path a project has follow. Not only to understand how the project is made but to apply some guidance to my own, projects. Does any have any good tools for this purpose?
No, I'm not aware of such tools. They might be too difficult to implement generically I guess.
Git (and therefor GitHub) should have an additional way of describing folders and files with a brief explanation instead of the last commit message. In the end all depends on the devs, but I've seen great open source projects with great docs and comments, but all that gets lost in the repo. Maybe git should default to JsDocs instead of commits if recognize them.
That's an interesting idea! But I guess for gitlab and github to be able to implement this, there needs to be a standard, e.g. a new file in the root called folders.md which has a specific structure or something. Is there such a standard that you know of?