Ask HN: Tips on starting developing project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tips on starting developing project?

10 pointshippich8 comments

I noticed it many times now - every time I am ready to jump working on next idea (very MVP-ish) I am looking through available libraries to get head start. Like get right folder structure, get right templating library (both server and client sides,) right combination of client libraries, something that already have basic CRUD and API layers working, etc... And every time I waste many hours browsing through GitHub, because each project is slightly not what I want to have.

Any tips on writing very first lines of code? :) Both mental and may be technological (look - I still looking for silver bullet here :))

ps: It is never problem for me to dive deeply into existing project and start feature in existing project from scratch, but totally new project - every time mental struggle.

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Very cliche suggestion, but just start.

Keep adding to it. You're gonna for sure write bad code thats going to be trashed, but keep working at it. The whole project might even be trashed but such is the expense of a creative.

Code, ship, fail(or succeed!), repeat.

Just go for it straight away, don't plan anything, just start typing. Just keep in the back of your mind that what you're writing is a prototype. After a while of tapping away at the keyboard (minutes, or hours, or days, ...) you will suddenly see the problem in a much clearer way.

At that point don't be afraid to:

1) Rewrite large sections of your prototype where your initial assumptions were wrong

2) Start again

Once you feel you've got a real handle on the problem, (and depending on the size of the project), it could be time to start some formal design based on what you now know.

Get framework/library which will do the most of work and run the example from documentation. Then try to make it better suite your needs. (Then fork it or switch to another library).

But there is so many of them! :)

Sure? What programming language do you use? There are always 2 or 3 of them. If it is something special, like some free AMF streaming video server, WebRTC STUN server, MQTT protocol implementation, MQ broker or whatever, there are very few real alternatives you can change of. I think it's the best driver for growing contributors to such kind of projects.

Of course, if it's not just another wtf blogging/sharing/socializing whatever platform written on Perl or on modern popular web language like PHP haha

Give it a try to Meteor.js platform. It's the easiest way to prototype client and server side code with minimum lines of code.

But I want Sqlite DB :) (for this particular project)

I've always been in need for some kind of coding project standards wiki.. Maybe I should just make one!

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