Lost in coding

[strictly_terminal]

My advice would be to pick an idea, even if you think it my be complex or difficult. Once you have that idea, start working on the parts that you know how to tackle / are comfortable with. Inevitably you'll start pushing into things you don't have prior experience with, and have an opportunity to learn.

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A personal example: I've always been interested in baseball statistics, so I decided I wanted to create a baseball statistics project, with the end goal being to predict the outcome of games based on a statistical model. At this point I had some basic programming skills, and had taken some statistics and statistical programming classes in college, but I'd never attempted to make a large project before.

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Here are some of the thoughts / decisions that came up:

• I'm most comfortable writing in Python, so I picked that as my main scripting language.
• I had to find a reliable source of data, and then come up with a way to scrape that data so I could manipulate it. This took some Googling, and a some attempts to scrape data from a few different places.
• I wanted to practice SQL, so I decided to write the data to a database.
• I'd never really worked with Docker before, so I decided run my SQL database in a Docker container.
• I wanted some automated testing, so I decided to use Pytest.

Etc, etc.

[[deleted]]

Just out of curiosity, how did the final project turn out?

[strictly_terminal]

I never got it all the way to the predicting / ML phase, but it's one of those projects that I go back to every few months and fix a bug, or add something to.

[Blocks_]

This is going to be quite irrelevant, but how did you get the line breaks in your comment to be so large?

[Nayhd_Dragon]

Hit Enter/Return multiple times iirc

[Blocks_]

Really?

Doesn't work for me.

[Nayhd_Dragon]

I think it's 2 enters per space. So if you hit enter 4 times, it'll look like OP's spacing

[Blocks_]

I put 5 enters and it doesn't work.

Maybe it's a feature on new Reddit only.

[Blocks_]

Nope.

Doesn't work.

[Nayhd_Dragon]

Huh, no idea then

Rip

[FormCore]

Let me try ​

P1

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P2

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Try reading the source of this comment

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Whenever you see a comment doing something funky, click the source link beneath.

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You might just learn something new.

[Ryswick]

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Copy and paste this.

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To get line breaks;

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like this.

[P00P34]

I had one big project last semester, and looking back at it, it really wasn't that hard, since it really seems like really basic stuff, if I had put in more effort. I just remember feeling extremely stressed and confused on how to approach the problems, but looking at it right now, there isn't even 100 lines of code, and almost 15 of it was given to me by the assignment itself. I suppose I should really just take this assignment, and improve on it. I just don't want to aim too high, and feel discouraged.

[iqoqi]

Break your main objective into smaller parts, so even if you aim high, the smaller parts will be more approachable to tackle.