#CodingQuestions #WebDevelopmentHelp #NewbieCoder
Hey fellow coders! 👋 Have you ever felt like you’re coding down a rabbit hole and you’re worried about messing things up in your project? I know the feeling! 🤯 As a first-year CS student diving into the world of web development, I recently tackled adding an audio player to my website using React and Tailwind, but now I’m hesitant to add new features on my own.
I don’t want to risk breaking everything I’ve worked so hard on! 😫 Do you have any tips or best practices for avoiding this dilemma? Here are a few things I’ve found helpful:
– Start by testing new features in a separate branch before merging them into your main project.
– Make good use of version control (like Git) to easily track changes and revert if necessary.
– Peer code reviews can help catch potential issues before they become big problems.
What do you think? Have you faced a similar situation when coding your projects? Let’s share our experiences and help each other grow as developers! 💻 #CodingCommunity #WebDevTips
Try concepts in separate projects. Create a tons of small pet-projects in order to explore your ideas. And move useful ideas into your main project.
If you haven’t started to use Git yet, do that now. It will make it easy to recover code back to a working point.
At some point you need to learn to stand on your own feet and making misstakes is part of that process. One way to evelove a project is to build it modular, evolve it in small incremental steps, trying different solutions, refactoring old solutions as you learn, throw away things that does not work. You may build POC:s to try different solutions in isolation before implemting it in your project, to explore possible known unknowns or to find new unknowns (try not to get to attached a solution as it may be thrown away next week, you may have learned a better way to do it or that part may no longer be required, it happens regulary that different stakeholders change their requirements and you have to delete days of your work)
(Tutorials are greate to learn about different concepts and specific topics, but they may not always provide optimal solutions for how to build projects that should evolve and be maintained over time, you need to make a judgement call on how to best use the information in your project)
Learn Git, that way you can always revert changes when you break something
Edit: To further explain: Git helps you versioning code and creating branches. Example: You have your branch “main”, which is your working project. Now you branch off that and name that branch “feature_1”. You can now do whatever you want on that branch. After it works and is tested, you can merge it back to your main branch. If it turns out to be wrong after all, you can still revert all of that.
If you have a version of your project that works you need to use version control like git. You would have a master branch which has this core code. Then anything new you want to create you will checkout a feature branch for. Once you finish developing your features. You can verify nothing is broken and then merge your feature branch into your master to update it.
you have time. right? do it the right way.
Take the application. Break it down to its elements. Use the understanding you garnered from you build experience and determine how you want to do it differently to fit the architecture you have in mind and re-evaluate if the build is worth it or not.
This will be an excellent practice for you and if documented and explained correctly, it can talk about updating your existing application as a project during your interview.
Find the standards and good practices for engineering an app.
Determine what you application is not doing correctly.
Refactor code to fit the good practice
Learn and document it as you move forward.
This is a better project than any react feature you are planning to implement. Most new engineer lack the knowledge of how to break things down and build it back up ( among other things). you have an unique opportunity here to show your newly learned skills.
There is no way to avoid this, if this is your first project you will sooner or later just go down the direction that will doom the whole project.
But that is the fun part. Don’t be scared, no stakes are in place.
Next time you will make it better and won’t make the same mistake!
Now when you are starting, just hack something together so it works..
EDIT: And yes, start the Git repository right now that once you screw up you can recover from it.
Using Git is essential. Start by creating branches and experimenting with new features without breaking your code. Once you have something that works or if you get stuck, seek out resources to improve your implementation. It’s also beneficial to find someone more experienced who can review your code (bonus : asking help/reviews to strangers will greatly help you with your networking). Trying things on your own first is key to learning the most. Designing features, making mistakes, brainstorming ideas, debugging code, and finding optimal solutions will absolutely enhance your understanding and help you making progress.
Good on you for going out into the deep end. This is exactly how I started.
Break everything up onto smaller projects, just like they teach you in school. Don’t just jump into the deep end through guides that expect you to have much more knowledge than you might have, learn bit by bit. You got this.
Start small, iterate and add complexity as you go.
you got this.
Learn Git, SQL, your Framework of choice. Implement. Don’t try and learn everything at once. Take it day by day, learn to enjoy the process.