Ask HN: How do you restart a coding project after vacation?
Imagine you are coding a fairly complex payment system with 6 or so classes, invoicing, payment confirmation, email messaging, due date tracking, etc. Memorial day comes and you leave your code as a series of half completed read and write methods, getters and setters, and some buggy calculations, briefly commented. When you come back, you are at a loss on how to restart. This is what happened to me and it's taking all day to get my head back in to it.
How do you come back to a coding project after being away from it for more than a few days?
2 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 14.2 ms ] thread+ simpler mental model
+ simpler code
reward yourself with small completed goals. take it easy!
I keep a log of what I'm working on, including to-do items (each of which get expanded into subtasks when I start working on it), next steps, questions to be resolved, ideas for future work, summaries of design discussions, etc. This gives me some context that I can look at when I go back to a task (whether it's after a short interruption like a meeting or a several-day long absence). I maintain this log as a plain text file that I keep open in my editor.
Another advantage of having a permanent, searchable log is being able to go back and figure out why I did something in the past.