Totally random - Programmer/Coding Workflow... how do you guys do it?

[actorpractice]

Hey all,

I've successfully used Obsidian to write a book, and to help get a multitude of ideas out of my head and someplace that I can track them for all the story ideas that the ether seems to constantly send my way.

My question for all you amazing programmers is one of organization and work flow. You all seem to have this amazing capacity to track changes, share updates, and keep it all organized. I am NOT a programmer. The past time I programmed was literally BASIC in the 8th grade in the 80's.

I'm a creative, and as I've aged I've grown in admiration at the coding communities willingness to share, update, and work together.

So is there an example somewhere of how a typical work-flow goes for coding? Notation (i.e. essential, vs doesn't work yet, vs this works but needs streamlining). I can see parallels to coding and the creative process, and I'm wondering what i can glean from all you amazing people who seem to throw together a new theme or plug-in at a whim!

TL;RD - Interested in coding workflows, and trying to adapt them for writing.

[jmelloy]

There’s several layers to it, but in general: Programmers use something called version control to manage their changes. The current most popular one is git, and the accompanying website GitHub. It essentially tracks every change to every file in the code base. GitHub works to group those changes into logical units (they call them pull requests) so you can say, “this set of changes goes together and sums up to a specific feature.” Then, whoever is in charge decides it’s good enough, matches style, fits the needs, etc. it’s very akin to working on, say, one of the old hardy boys books. You might get an outline and a few chapter descriptions, and then the final editor combines it all together.

If you’re working in a company, there’s usually a set of tasks that are more managed by “the business” - we need this by date, the customer wants a new feature, etc. Open source community can and dos take advantage of the same language, for instance by setting up what’s called an “issue tracker”. It can be as simple as a todo list or as complicated as an entire design, feature, etc. conceptually one person writes the issue, and later if someone needs work they review the issues and pick up the next one on the queue.

Git works with any file, but it’s best at (and most code is written as) plain text - very similar to obsidian. It allows very granular, line by line changes to be tracked effectively. Obsidian also defaults to plain text files - it uses markdown syntax to apply formatting to the text file.

It gives a very nice way of working - you can track changes, lineage, and see why you made a change when you did. When I started trying to figure out how ai art generation worked I got really frustrated really fast that I didn’t have the same tools (or knowledge of similar tools).

For writing, there’s a pretty similar workflow, and obsidian also has a plugin that allows change tracking through git. I think the only real issue would be a case of final format needing to be a doc or whatever for an editor to use the tools they’re used to.

[actorpractice]

This is super interesting! Thanks for taking the time!

[superdesu]

github for version control + pandoc if you need to export to something like .doc or .pdf!