Programming With No Organization or Planning?

This isn’t a guide on how to program without being organized or without any planning. Why? Because you *SHOULD NOT* do it! I created a couple projects recently that helped solidify this point. Maybe you are sort of organized with no plan or you sort of have a plan with no organization, any lack of either concept can be detrimental to your overall project health (and maybe your mental health as well.)

Let us go with my recent experiences. Project I which we will call the “Need Work” project and project II will be called the “That’s Better”. For project I, I created a user story and had what I believed was/is a great idea. Once the user story was created which laid out how the user will experience the app, I set out to create my models/tables/attributes for the backend part of my application. Now I am done right?! I can now go on and start coding my project! This was my original thought which I realized later was not the way to go at all. I may have been alright in one part of my planning but the part I missed was the planning of the structure of the code. And when you are dealing with fetching data from a rails api and passing data through your react props, not knowing exactly where things are coming from and going will cause you to spend hours trying to debug your code when you for example submit a form to add a video and your video for all you know has been eaten by the dark web .

Now let’s think about the “That’s Better” project. Imagine, writing with a blueprint that explicitly says all your data will be in this section of your program, your routes will consistently look like this so that any mistyping can easily be caught, or these components will be presentational components which only is used for displaying data and these components will be functional components so calculations are not all over the place leading to easier debugging (notice I didn’t say easy because lets be honest even with the proper organization and planning this stuff is still difficult).

Yes organization and planning leads to debugging not being as long of a process, and yes if someone is helping with your code, they can have a better idea of the flow of your data, and yes you will go bed happier, but one thing I found is that you will actually want to continue to improve your application. My “Need Work” project turned into the “That Is Good Enough” project whereas my “That’s Better” project turned into a “I Can Want To Make This Better” project. Taking the time to organize and plan out your program in the beginning cannot be understated and I know I will take this experience with me on all future projects and you should to!