Tie Guan Yin #07
I did a shortened live coding session as an episode 7 of The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin.
I focused on a single thing: PHP code archeology to discover how the old site escapes and presents HTML. Armed with that knowledge, I recreated an acceptable interim solution for the new Django version.
That will have to stay on until we’re far enough that old version can be shut down and we can clean up the current mess.
The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin is a webcast series where I drink tea and refactor my old Czech website (that is due for its 20th anniversary next year) into an open-source project.
I plan to cut this into annotated shorter snippets at one point, but I want to get the work done first. The aim is to help new programmers bridge the gap between finishing basic learnings and tutorials and submerging into a real-world project. The particular areas I see people struggling with:
- Debugging, debugging, and debugging. Discovery and reasoning behind old decisions
- Orienting yourself in a larger codebase
- Making product micro-decisions
- Considerations tied to running the project in production
- Practical learning and blending the learnings of fundamentals with technologies that operate on top of them
This is thus an unstructured series that doesn’t contain prepared segments. I do share how I learn, how I debug and how do I overcome obstacles thrown in my way in technologies I am not an expert in. I am also trying to demonstrate how technology decisions depend on the context and sharing how I would decide differently under different conditions (i.e. larger project, stringer security requirements, etc.). I am also producing a real code produced under time constraints and going through optimal time/value path.