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That one dev who told me to stop over-planning my code
I spent 3 weeks diagramming a todo app in a notebook before writing a single line. A guy in the Python Discord server just said 'youre gonna refactor it anyway so just start typing lol' and honestly that clicked. Has anyone else wasted too much time on design docs before their first real project?
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reeseperez1mo ago
That's a hot take but honestly I gotta disagree with that dev. Planning isnt some optional thing, its the whole reason projects dont fall apart halfway through. Three weeks for a todo app is a lot, sure, but the habit of thinking through your code before writing it is what separates people who finish stuff from people who quit when things get messy. The whole 'just start typing' thing works great for tiny scripts, but a real project with multiple files and features? Youre gonna hit a wall without at least a rough map in your head. Theres a middle ground between overdoing it and jumping in blind, and that devs advice leans way too far into the second one.
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the_stella1mo ago
No no no, one thousand percent agree here. There is a huge difference between mapping out your app's logic ahead of time and straight up overthinking a todo app for three weeks that's basically "add, delete, mark done."
That dev had a good point though, you gotta find that balance somewhere in the middle. Too much planning and you're just writing a novel without ever typing a line of code, too little and you're stuck in refactor hell forever.
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