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67 lines
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67 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
[#]: collector: (lujun9972)
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[#]: translator: ( )
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[#]: reviewer: ( )
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[#]: publisher: ( )
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[#]: url: ( )
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[#]: subject: (Day 8: Start with something that works)
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[#]: via: (https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/11/18/how-to-do-hard-projects--start-with-something-that-works/)
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[#]: author: (Julia Evans https://jvns.ca/)
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Day 8: Start with something that works
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======
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Today at RC I’m a little stuck so here’s a very short reflection on how to do hard programming problems :)
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I was talking to a friend yesterday about how to do programming projects that are a bit out of your comfort zone, and I realized that there’s a pattern to how I approach new-to-me topics! Here I’m especially thinking about little side projects where you want to get the thing done pretty efficiently.
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When I start on a new project using some technology I haven’t worked with before, I often:
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1. Find some code on the internet that already does something a little like what I want
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2. Incrementally modify that code until it does what I want, often completely changing everything about the original code in the process
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Here are a couple of quick thoughts about this process:
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### it’s important that the initial code _works_
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Often when I’m out looking for examples, I’ll find a lot of code that I can’t get to work quickly, often because the code is kind of old and things have changed since then. Whenever possible, I try to find code that I can get to work on my computer pretty quickly.
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It’s been pretty helpful to me to give up relatively quickly on code that I can’t get to work right away and look for another example – often there is something out there that’s more recent and that I can get to work more quickly!
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### you have to be able to incrementally change the code into what you want
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Today I’ve been working with some neural network code, and one thing I’m really struggling with for the last couple of days is that I find it pretty easy to find somewhat relevant Jupyter notebooks that do RNN things, and pretty hard to modify those examples to do something closer to what I want. They keep breaking and I then don’t know how to fix them.
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Last week I was working on a Rails app, which I think is something that’s very easy to incrementally change into the program you want: `rails new` gives you a webserver that does almost nothing, but it works! And then you just need to change it one tiny step at a time into the website you want to build.
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### examples of “something that works”
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* If you want to write a window manager, [tinywm][1] is a window manager in 50 lines of C!
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* this tiny kernel written in Rust that does nothing was a fun starting point for an operating system <https://github.com/charliesome/rustboot> (probably it’s not a good starting point today)
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* `rails new`, like I talked about above
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* I love that <https://glitch.com/> projects let you “view source” on the backend of any Glitch project
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* Jupyter notebooks, like [these great NLP tutorials by Allison Parrish][2]
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### that’s all!
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I think little starting points like this are so important and can be really magical. Finding the right starting point can be hard, but when I find a good one it makes everything so much easier!
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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via: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/11/18/how-to-do-hard-projects--start-with-something-that-works/
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作者：[Julia Evans][a]
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选题：[lujun9972][b]
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译者：[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID)
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校对：[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID)
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本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出
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[a]: https://jvns.ca/
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[b]: https://github.com/lujun9972
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[1]: http://incise.org/tinywm.html
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[2]: https://twitter.com/aparrish/status/876117075567284225
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