“A weeks worth of programming can save hours of planning.”
When programming first sparked my interest. I found myself diving immediately into a project. Throwing caution to the wind, I opened up my dev tools and starting typing away. A day later I looked at the code I had spent all day on and realized, nothing made any sense. Despite my best efforts of making sure my indentations were good and my variable names were sound, my code effectively did nothing. I became frustrated that I wasted so much time, threw the project away and dove right into a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually I realized, what I think, all good programmers realize, planning a project is worth the time.
As my team worked through our team standards and project plan, I couldn’t help find myself feeling a little jumpy. I wanted to get started on my part. Even while we were still creating our project plan, I thought, what if I just created a login page? Maybe I could even get started on the leader board for our game. However, I reminded myself, we hadn’t confirmed who was doing what parts. I didn’t know what flow of events needed to happen in our game. Anything I put together could be scraped and I would have wasted hours tinkering instead of developing.
Doing research and looking at the big picture of an assignment or a program can take up some time. You could spend days, even weeks, working through the basic path of what you want your program to accomplish. However, your time is valuable and planning out your steps is not wasting it. Starting with the big picture and breaking it down into smaller parts will help keep you productive in your programming and on schedule… most of the time. Most importantly, it will keep you from wasting your time.
