Thoughts about my project (progress, maintainability, productivity)

Reposting from the techlahoma #tech-talk channel

I'm working on my project, but it seems to be taking awhile. I think about each part and built a small prototype of each part and then I piece these parts together thinking about the whole.

Does oop help organize all the moving parts so it is easier to rationalize?Maybe it is how my brain works, but I am basically forced to print my code out a lot, mark it up with pen,crayon, pencil, compare it  to new (and previous) code that works, and fit it into new code. In graduate school, I did a lot of procedural programming, and C is a procedural language. I do print out code that is written in typescript, so to extent it is my brain.I think writing tests both in Unity for C and Jest for typescript/javascript has helped me cover some bases. It hasn't always been TDD. I think some of the time I have had not but a vague idea of what I should code, and what libraries I should use, or what parts should be there. It was this should do this, or this should talk to this. ...Over time by working through it I discovered I also needed to do thisValgrind is a very useful tool for writing C code. It just saved the day today my reminded me I needed to initialize a struct. After I did this, my code worked in a much more desirable way. (edited)

I'm definitely coding by code I can find online. It is not always easy to know all of the code that I need to get small things to work. Some might call this boilerplate?zI remember starting out with HTTP requests, and then through discussions here, switching to websockets. I needed a persistent connection that did not hang up because I was constantly streaming data out. (if I recall correctly)My computer is littered with small programs that I have run or compiled. Some only have a small change from the next. At times when I have had the discipline to use Git my organization has improved. (edited)

I do get scenes like this quite a bit. There is nothing quite like printing stuff out and marking it up, whether it be code, a tutorial, or documentation.

I thought that maybe this should be a blog post.

One of the repositories that I have been making pull requests on requires that I run a linter in addition to jest. I think they have their github repository set up with circleCI that includes this to protect against poorly behaving actors like me.

In the future, if I choose to refactor my C code to C++ code it might be useful to write tests using a test framework like Unity. I have a much better idea of what should be there, so does seem likely that I will be able to talk about each individual piece of logic.

It's amazing how quickly I can forget what I did. I look at a code base that I spent a good while one many months ago and be surprised that I had the ability to write it.  After a few days  spent relearning, I can usually get up to speed.

I think having more tests could help me recover from amenesia. If it is a bunch of files that I have to trace through then that can be quite time consuming and challenging. Inevitably that always seems to happen. I usually can trick out what my train of thought was, but it takes time.