May 05, 2021

Notes Driven Development

2 minutes

https://youtube.com/c/RyanFlorence

Hey friends So I was watching a live stream from Ryan Florence last night

while I was putting my kids to bed They were falling asleep and I was in

the room to make sure that they didn't go all whacko and stuff while

they're trying to fall asleep. And so I was just watching Ryan codeps some

stuff.

You should check it out. Actually Ryan has gotten some really good live

streams recently, especially if you're interested in remix and stuff. And

and actually sometimes I'll just watch it during the day. I'll just have it

on in a different tab while I'm working and if I hear something that sounds

interesting I can go over there.

So, it's kind of fun and interesting.And and yeah it's kind of fun to be on

this side of the live streaming stuff at home but anyway one thing that I

noticed that Ryan doesn't and I've seen him do this any time that I've seen

him code not just in this livestream.

So he's been doing this for a while as far as I know. But he has this

document open in his editor that's just like marked down format stuff. That

outlines exactly what he plans on doing for that coding session, or at

least he kind of keeps notes of the things that he's still needs to do.

That's not exactly pseudo code, but like, you know, create a user then save

that users.Session in the database and then, you know, whatever else. And

it I I I like this approach for me. I typically just have in my mind this

idea of what I want to do and then I just go scramble around and and do the

activities until those things are all finished but it's not as directed and

I feel like I could definitely improve in this way and and get a little bit

better at making sure that I'm accomplishing some specific tasks and and it

also at the end of the day, you feel like you got a lot more done.

I do have a notepad that I,Where I write down all the things that I'm gonna

do for the day but normally that includes stuff outside of coding and then

I've got like work on this work on the website or whatever. And it would be

cool to get a little more granular especially when you're working on new

features and and stuff like that.

So I just thought that would be an interesting tip to share so next time

you start working on a particular feature go ahead and just open up a text

file and write out kind of outline the different tasks that you need to get

accomplished and every couple minutes or so review that.

And see what you've finished and and what you need to work on next kind of

help direct your your thought process and and implementation so that you

get things done. And of course, you can always do it like test-driven

development style if you want to but some of these things would be a little

hard to test drive.

So in those situations having a list can be really helpful. Anyway, I'm

gonna give this a shot some time and hope you do too and I hope it's

helpful to you. Have a good day.

...more

View all episodes

By Kent C. Dodds

44 ratings