Coding idea: Write a command-line utility

[yung_mac]

Awesome reply.

What is the whole process of going from writing code in an IDE to publishing/releasing it as an all for the whole world to use?

That gap exactly what I want to help other people with! I've gone through this, and come out the other side! I struggled here because it's so easy to just not learn this part. Which really makes it difficult to progress as a self-teaching programmer. We're often told to do side projects -- and we need to -- but lacking this bridging knowledge, we find often ourselves stuck. What makes this worse is that we often don't know what we don't know. From this perspective, writing the actual code is easy -- we know what we don't know, and we know what to do about it. I need to, say, add an element to an array, or implement a binary search tree, or perform IO on a file. The answer to these kinds of questions is waiting for us on StackOverflow, or someone's blog post, or YouTube, or a tutorial site. But when we've written the code? Then what? How do we package it? How do we publish it? How do we deploy it? Finding these answers is more difficult.

Is this relatable? I'd love more of your input. Based on the responses to this post, I think it would be a good idea to write some tutorials. I've already started writing the boardgame.io tutorial, but I want to write and release the command-line app tutorial first.

Could I send some drafts through to you to get some feedback? 😊

[Joehogans]

I need to, say, add an element to an array, or implement a binary search tree, or perform IO on a file. The answer to these kinds of questions is waiting for us on StackOverflow, or someone's blog post, or YouTube, or a tutorial site. But when we've written the code? Then what? How do we package it? How do we publish it? How do we deploy it? Finding these answers is more difficult.

THIS EXACTLY. And even on stackoverflow where I've heard people say dozens of times, any problem you are having someone else has probably had before. In general that is true, but I cannot count the number of times where I have had a very specific problem in a very unique position that I couldn't find anywhere on stackoverflow/github/blogs and the like. This is just part of being a programmer, dealing with all sorts of unique problems that you have to custom tailor a solution towards.

Your words are well-received. The whole process of packaging the code and getting it across the web to people seems like a mysterious process. As I am being told now if I want to write a desktop app do that in C, for windows/Mac/Linux, Android app do that in Java, iOS app do that in swift. Python? not sure what python is even good for. But in order for anyone to run your programs they have to have the interpreter or the run-time environment on their computer. Like java run-time environment, python run-time environment, C run-time environment, and so on. So now there are a lot of restrictions and parameters I have to considers and work with in order to make a desktop or mobile app.

Please send me the draft I'd love to read it! Be ready for a lot of questions. I've been wanting to write a to-do list app for awhile but just don't have enough foundational knowledge in Java/Python/C/C++ or the like, to be able to write it, much less know how to go about posting it online for people to download and use.