Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through my “frank build” journey. It’s not pretty, but it works, and that’s what matters, right?
It all started when I wanted to… well, I wanted to build something. I had this idea kicking around in my head, but I didn’t really know where to begin. I figured, “Hey, let’s just start and see where it goes.” That’s the “frank” part – totally unstructured, just going with the flow.
First, I grabbed some basic stuff I knew I’d need. This was like, the super bare minimum. I’m talking about the fundamental tools. Didn’t want to get bogged down in details before I even knew what I was doing. So, I just gathered the essentials.
Then, I started coding. No planning, no architecture diagrams, nothing. Just straight into the code. I wrote some functions, connected a few things, and BAM! it was a mess. But hey, at least I had something on the screen, right?
The key was iteration. I would write a little bit, see if it worked, and then write some more. When it didn’t work (which was often), I’d just hack away at it until it did. No fancy debugging tools, just console logs and a lot of trial and error.
Of course, I ran into a ton of problems. Things like:
- Weird bugs that made no sense
- Performance issues that brought everything to a crawl
- Code that was just plain ugly and unmaintainable
But I didn’t let that stop me. I’d Google the errors, look at Stack Overflow, and copy-paste code until something worked. Sometimes, I even understood what I was doing. Sometimes not.
As the project grew, it became clear that my initial approach wasn’t sustainable. The code was a tangled mess, and I couldn’t keep track of anything. So, I had to start refactoring. A little bit at a time.
Refactoring was painful. It meant rewriting code that already worked (sort of). But it was necessary. I started breaking things down into smaller, more manageable modules. Added some comments (finally!). And even wrote some unit tests (gasp!).
Eventually, after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (mostly metaphorical), I had something that actually resembled a functional application. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. And that’s all that mattered.
So, that’s my “frank build” story. It’s not pretty, it’s not elegant, but it got the job done. And sometimes, that’s the best you can ask for. I learned a ton in the process. I now know a bit more and I hope you found it useful too.
The whole point of this build was to see if I could just build something even without detailed design or documentation from the get go. Turns out I can.
Until next time, happy coding!
