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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • I think about a feature or bugfix that I want to work on, then shoehorn it in by any means necessary. Once my code is confirmed working, the planning phase begins and I go through the module(s) I’m working with line-by-line and match the original author’s coding style and usually by that point I pick up a trail or discover a bunch of helper functions/libraries that I can use to replace parts of my code, and continue from there.

    As others have said, configuration files is a great way to learn that. Pick a config option you want to learn about, jump to the config loader, find where the variable gets set, then do a global search for that function. From there it starts to fall into place.

    Sidenote: I also learned rust this way. It took me around 6 months to learn the rgit codebase solely from adding features that I wanted from cgit. Now I’m at the point where rebasing from upstream to my soft-fork doesn’t mess up any of my changes, and am able add or fix things with relative ease. If memory serves, a proper debugger (firedbg is excellent!) was used on several occasions to track down an extremely annoying and ambiguous error message that was due to rust’s trait system being a pain in my ass.



  • Over-explaining is my biggest issue. I’m entirely self taught and the trash quality of certain softwares with non-descriptive variable and function names sort of steered me towards clearly naming things (sometimes verbosely). That has the unfortunate side effect of repetition when documenting and it comes across as sarcastic or condescending when proofreading.

    Its far easier to have a machine do it than to second-guess every sentence.

    You mentioned a llamafile, is that offline? I’m using GPT-4 at the moment because my partner has a subscription. If so, I maaaay have to check it out ^^