January 31st, 2008 : Relearning Your Code
One of the worst feelings I get when programing is the feeling when coming back to an unfinished project after several days (maybe a week or perhaps a month) of not working on it. Reloading the code back into the brain is time consuming and annoying. If I know that I don’t really have the time to jump back into, it’s even harder, because I really have to force myself to learn it again, because my mind will tell me constantly that it is not worth the effort.
That’s where I am right now. But I’m hoping to find time this weekend, so I need to start sooner rather than later.
I know exactly how this feels. The courses at my college try to imprint the idea on us to keep code well documented and commented so this doesn’t happen, but even then it’s not easy to relearn everything (especially if there’s a bug hiding somewhere). I’m actually in this same boat myself. The difference is mine is for a prof at the college…
I usually like to keep mine code clean, and I’m pretty good at documenting things, the thing for me right now is remembering what exactly I want the program to do and what order it has to be done in. Since I’m renaming and moving files I need to make sure I have the names and paths all correct and moved at the right time.