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Domitrius
Domitrius

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Organizing yourself to start coding and stop preparing

A wildly undervalued topic (or at least so I've seen) surrounds getting yourself from tutorial watching, reading, and planning to getting your first code down and ready to start architecting your application.

Personally, no matter how big or small a project is anymore, I feel the pre project jitters. The constant voice who tells you to wait, learn some more, read some more etc before diving in.

You don't want to dive in and get stuck right? Or maybe you're worried about proving the imposter right.

Let's open up a discussion surrounding the actions you deploy to get yourself confident enough to crack open VSCode and get to work.

I'll start it off.

( I mainline React applications, so it has some specifics, but you can apply it however you'd like! )

Recently I've gotten super into using my Wipebook to sketch out the main design that comes to mind. Whatever I'm going to build there has to be an initial idea that hits that JUST MIGHT be the one.

From there, I'll usually start to break down each piece of the website into components. What's the component? Does it have children? What are they called? This helps me start to think deeply about where I'm going AND how I'm going to get there.

Then comes time to crack open the editor and NOT start writing the tough stuff. There is an endless amount of questions that need answers before feeling confident enough to start building things out.

What does each component need to do?

Where's the data coming from?

How am I handling the error or the success?

What about the time the user's waiting?????

Overwhelmed?? Me too.

So instead of worrying about the complicated pieces, I just start scaffolding the HTML. Then move on to thinking about the class names. From there I can start breaking my code into components and deeper and deeper you will journey.

You'll be shocked how much just doing this, puts you in a more confident mind set. Suddenly you have the start to your project more planned out than you had expected and even have some code written.

How about you Dev.to'ers? How do you start your projects?

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