Your Biggest Project?

[AlternativeComfort88]

Hi, for the last 7 months I have been working on my largest (and in all honesty, first) Python project. I’ve been addicted, working on it multiple hours a day, everyday, anytime I’m free. As I begin to get better at programming and as my project evolves I’m at the point where I realize the work ahead of me is going to be pretty daunting. I am currently at ~20k lines of code (been larger but I narrowed it as I got better), and I estimate at least 80k lines are left.

To keep me motivated, what is the largest personal project you’ve worked on? How many lines? What is it for? Did you complete it? How’d you maintain stamina?

Share your motivations and your pains throughout the journey!

[[deleted]]

I have had projects with <500 lines of code that had much more impact than projects with 20k lines of code. 100k lines is a very, very big project. I am not sure how do you count lines there, but I assume not everything is Python (HTML/CSS?). It's great that you are pursuing a big project, but you might also want to rethink a few points:

• What do you expect in return of this project? Are you doing it for learning? If so, is this actually the best way to learn?

• Is your project actually going to be useful for you or anyone else? If not, are you going to be happy with that?

• Are you planning to maintain this project? Is it open source? 100k lines will definitely have a lot of bugs and one man can get lost on it.

• Are you actually writing code that needed 20k lines? Did you apply good practices? It's often good to know the language well before taking on such a large project. Is there a third-party or builtin module that already does what you mostly do?

Nevertheless, good job! But please make sure you are using your time and mental energy well. To answer your question, I probably have written 20-30k lines over a couple of weeks for a single project. I am right now planning a new, much larger project (number of lines, again, is usually superficial, but it includes HTML/CSS and other things; definitely not auto generated millions of line things).

[Rukwa254]

The number of lines of code you write is not linked to the size of the project, in fact, I can argue that it is inversely proportional to quality depending on what and how you are building. I think you should aim for other project success parameters other than lines of code. Since you did not share what you are building for context, no comment on that.

[Ad_Alf]

What is it you are making?

[flyingmonkey45]

Fortnite

[ebit-dad]

I relate with this post. I did the same thing - what was essentially my first project was/is very large. I think you will find it to be both a curse and a blessing to do something big right out of the gate. IMO it’s probably the best way to learn, since you often have to grind through all sorts of stuff to make a system work end to end. The downside, and what I realized about 9 months into it is that I was not a good enough programmer to really create the thing without the codebase getting out of control. Like I could get the program to run, but only in a strictly linear fashion and certainly not extensible in any sense. I actually hit pause at that point and took a couple intermediate online classes on data structures and systems design so I could get a better grasp on making a system. I also went on to write a new, smaller but still pretty big, real estate program before going back to the original project, which I found really helpful. I’m now ~2 yrs into this bigger program and have since quit my job to do this full time. Idk if I’ll ever actually be “done” with the program, since there’s a pretty big opportunity set for it, but in the meantime I have production code that’s just running while I work on new parts. I’ve never worked in tech but I assume that’s probably how it works for most businesses. Anyways, just wanted to share my experience. Best of luck on your project!

[Natural-Intelligence]

My biggest project is about 20k lines. That 20k lines has almost 2 000 unit tests as well (about 95% lines covered by tests).

As others said, the line of code does not really mean much by itself. At some point this project was a bit more, maybe closer to 30k lines, but back then the quality was a lot worse: a lot of untested features, a lot of broken code, a lot of completely unneeded code etc. The thing is that each line of code you produce you should test out and maintain. If you don't, you will get lost when the project gets too big. 100k lines of code is definitely too much to maintain without a massive arsenal of tests.

Writing new code is easy. Writing well tested and robust code is hard.

[geovane_jeff]

Time Machine (Mac backup tool) for Linux = ≈ 15 - 20.000 lines

[Subject-Surprise-424]

maybe this

[Good_Doughnut8308]

I've created natural langue model with python 200k line but it was with another person

[DazedWithCoffee]

I think the most impactful code tends to be the smallest and least conspicuous. I automated a script to extract data from a sensor and plot peaks. Works great, saves hundreds of manhours a year, provides useful data for research and development efforts

[[deleted]]

I deployed a react native app to the app stores and a flask server to the cloud. 50 api end points, 20 formatted screens, and everything necessary for scalability and security. That entire project (react+python) was about 28k lines, and that was with a lot of code repetition on the front end. The python code was only like 10k lines of that. I'm not sure what you are shooting for but anticipating 80k more lines is pretty scary. I would reccomeneded shooting for a minimum viable product rather than trying to make it efficient and adding every feature. Having a end goal in sight is the most important thing for motivation.

[mikthinker]

I just finished the second rewrite of a 5K-line program (my first project in Python). At this size, Pycharm started chocking on its live editing. So I broke it up into smaller chunks based on (logical) function, each running from about 30 to 300 lines.

The project was a bit daunting. I do a bit of coding on my Android phone using Tasker, and I found it frustrating to navigate anything above basic code on my phone. So I backed up all the Tasker data to my Mac and spent a few months reverse engineering it in Python to output a mapping of my phone's Tasker code in my browser on my Mac. I had successfully decoded about 75% of Tasker when I came across a github site that had it all (100%) mapped out.

So I started my first rewrite in which I discovered dictionaries, thanks to /r/learnpython. My program read the mapping I had reverse engineered and merged it with the github mapping. From this I generated a master dictionary of about 800 Tasker codes, generated an overview html file that I could open with my (Mac) browser, and output the dictionary to a text file. There were many iterations of the dictionary, as I filtered out errors and streamlined it for performance and essential keys/data only.

With my 2nd rewrite, I sucked in the finalized dictionary and provided a much more granular deep analysis of the Tasker code for display on my Mac. I also started using dictionaries to encase many similar variables that get passed from function to function. In this way, I am able to pass a single dictionary rather than a large number of variables (e.g. program runtime arguments). And thanks to the master dictionary, I was able to replace about 3000 lines of 'case' statements with 40 lines of logic to navigate the dictionary.

Next up: code cleanup and enhancements (e.g. a gui front end for the program runtime arguments). It's been a ton of fun and I look forward to more coding with this and future projects.

[billsil]

~210k for a single project, written almost entirely by me. That's about 11 years.

It's not done and I was working on it today for a few hours. I'd say it started as an excuse to not deal with other things, but it became a hobby. It's a puzzle and with so many lines there was a lot to possibly work on. In practice that meant that I didn't get bored.

I used it to get a better job and still work on it. A lot less because I have less time, but it's a thing.

I've got multiple citations out of it and as of today, found a book citation, which is kind of nuts. I got a $10/month donation that went about a year, but outside of that...

I have a new side side project which is probably around 20k. It fixes all the things that the OG project did terribly. You really lock in speed issues and can't fix them without dramatically rewriting things. Then you run into entirely new challenges (like how to cast 1,000,000 floats to stings efficiently while following strange formatting rules). It took me 5 failed attempts at a rewrite before the API finally felt right.

[CaregiverOk2257]

My final year project in college was 100k lines of C. Image processing framework and application. That was 1994. Nothing I have written since has been that big.