the hardest part about coding?

harmor

What do you think the hardest part about coding is?

For me it's getting the project off the ground.
I'm looking at a blank canvas thinking "Where do I start"?
After I get some code down it's easy sailing, well for the most part.

cheerio

Brainstorming the structure and all

harmor

bradgrafelman wrote:
Motivation. I guess I'm just busy with everything else, but I find it hard to get myself to sit down and give my attention to the project at hand.

Sometimes I get a burst of motivation and start coding hours on end. Then out of nowhere I lose interest and I abandon the project.

esiason14

harmor wrote:
Sometimes I get a burst of motivation and start coding hours on end. Then out of nowhere I lose interest and I abandon the project.

That sounds really familiar 😃

Jason_Batten

harmor wrote:
Sometimes I get a burst of motivation and start coding hours on end. Then out of nowhere I lose interest and I abandon the project.

That's because you need to plan out every aspect of the project first. You need to give yourself (and your team if you have one) something to look forward to. Getting a project of the ground sucks! :bemused: Planning sucks but you need to understand all of the benefits to even bother. Playing around with code is a good idea but I stress the word play, don't attempt to write anything useful without planning it out first. If you don't have the motivation to tough through the planning phase then you sure as hell don't have it to code and maintain it 🙂

I have a great situation at the moment. Without planning I wrote an application last year, it was a simple enough but nasty as code. A few months after writing the application I updated it without planning the update - difficult to plan to update something that has no blue prints. Think of a house, think of a house built without plans. Now try to think of extending that house, you'd need to search the memory and the only output will be "um, ahhh". Imagine if a new team of builders wanted to extend the house, they'd have to waste time inspecting the house trying to work out where everything is. They'd probably just knock down the house and start again. Recently I have been playing around with my old code, it is nasty and I mean nasty! So I thought "**** this, I'm rebuilding it". The old application still has bugs due to poor design.

Plan, plan, plan 😃

Sex and money are great motivators maybe you can implement the rewards of either or all into your development process 😉

goldbug

Convincing yourself it's at a release point.

cheerio

I think somebody should make a forum dedicated to like, PHP/MySQL PLANNING. Only planning, and that's it. I sure as hell could use something like that.
More experienced programmers can help build some foundations that people can learn from and use.

halojoy

I find the hardest part
is often finding a good alternative for Database.
Whenever I make my own scripts, I never make them dependent of MySQL.
They should work at any webspace not supporting free or paid MySQL.

So I endup with my custom datastorage php functions.
Or I use scripts that supports SQLite, which is a good alternative.

I have downloaded ADOdb Lite today.
It is a lite and faster version of ADOdb dblayer so supports SQLite and almost whatever DB.
I made some test scripts installing ADOdb Lite and using SQLite.
Went well.

ADOdb Lite is an open source project at Sourceforge.net
Here at website, you can see what functions is supported, and which are not.
http://adodblite.sourceforge.net/functions.php

ADOdb Lite supports a new session handler that offers support for ADOdb's encryption and compression options. ADOdb Lite's session handler is 1/3 the size of ADOdb's and over 350% faster
http://adodblite.sourceforge.net/sessions.php

This was something about what considerations I have to figure out first
when starting creating a new PHP application script
or when looking for a suitable php software to download.

🙂
.

Weedpacket

Um, database!=MySQL

vaaaska

Focus...consistency...dealing with feature creep (there is never enough planning at the beginning). If you have your own library of reusable code then getting started is never so hard.

For myself, the courage to not be the best is what gets my through programming projects. I know they are safe, they work, so I have to be encouraged by something or they would never be completed.

Weedpacket

vaaaska wrote:
dealing with feature creep (there is never enough planning at the beginning)

Even when there is enough planning. It is a grevious pain when Must Haves for version 3.0 require a complete trashing of the version 2 codebase because the architecture needs to be totally rethought.

And thinking it out the first time was bad enough, especially for me. Give me a firmly-established architecture to begin with and I'm happy. Yes, I'll implement those interface methods no problem. What, you want me to design the interface as well?

vaaaska

Weedpacket wrote:
It is a grevious pain when Must Haves for version 3.0 require a complete trashing of the version 2 codebase because the architecture needs to be totally rethought.

It's funny how clients know what to ask for that makes this happen... 😉

Weedpacket

"Hey, could you make those forms Word templates instead? It's just that our office staff are used to Word templates...."