How do you Dev? · AI Developer Accelerator

Dec '24 (edited) • Full Stack Development with AI

How do you Dev?

Hey, All, I'm interested in your approach to developing an Idea or program. Perhaps what you are doing can influence others or myself. I am constantly looking to improve my cycle, and so to kick it off, here's how I Develop.

The Idea - Sketch out your Idea. Excalidraw is excellent for this, but you can use your favourite tool. Flesh it out, follow a flow. Where does it go? I find this part of the process very helpful later on. You are generating a plan by sketching out what you think you need to do.

2. Take Notes - Make notes on your sketch. Notes jog memories; memories lead to re-jigging of sketches or remembering something you may have forgotten in phase 1.

3. Revisit your sketch. Does anything need to be added? If the answer is No!, go do something else and come back to it. If you still can't think of any enhancements, then this part of the process is completed for now.

4. Generate a Masterplan - I used

@Brandon Hancock

Master document idea from his Claude Artifacts video to test my idea. It is good at interrogating you as a user. Ensure you feed Claude the sketch you worked on in the previous phases. This is helpful for context in AI. At the end of the first Phase, you have a great document to move forward with

5. Do you need to update your sketch? - If the master document creation threw out any new ideas or changed your thinking on your original idea, revisit the sketch. Update it as required

6. Stubbing out - We can move on to Phase Two of the plan: Stubbing out your project. Depending on Your IDE, you can either use an IDE or Claude to help create and stubb out your starter files. I use Cursor/Windsurf, so I feed the IDE the master document in Cursor Composer and then await its replies on Directory structure and code creation.

7. Local Git - Now that we have some local files, you must get them into version control. Typicaly that is git for most people. This ensures that if you regularly commit files to your local repo, you can always roll back if you screw up. Granted, you need to commit to git periodically. I typically do a commit after each new feature addition.

8. GitHub - Github is your saviour and also possibly your portfolio. Now that you are developing files on your computer and periodically saving them to your local git repo. Now is the time to 'git push' them to your GitHub account. If you don't have one, stop right now and set one up; it's free and so worth it. I say GitHub is your saviour; you might wonder what I mean. Having great code is good; having great code only on your local computer is terrible! What happens if the local storage crashes, a local catastrophe, etc? Having code on GitHub means you can always return it to the last push.

9. Log everything in GitHub issues—When you're developing stuff, your brain works on multiple things simultaneously. Now and then, you will get a thought about something you 'could do' with the application. Make a note somewhere. My chosen method is to stick it into GitHub issues labelled as an enhancement. That way, I don't lose my notes, and I can tick it off when it's done, getting a little dopamine hit along the way.

Well, that's my process.

Writing it all out doesn't seem very easy, but it is. It's second nature to me now, and I find it really helpful to have the structure around the idea to keep me on track.

Sure, other things always pop up. Update your sketch, log the issue in GitHub, and move on. Finish the feature you are working on, commit it to your local git, and push it to GitHub, and you will find yourself in a better place. Look at 'git branching' this protects your main code even more.

I have used 'git reset --hard origin/main' more than I would like to admit. But at least I had the code in Git to roll it back to a known good starting point.

Here are my sketching, my GitHub issues, and my git commit history showing how I branch for a feature and then merge after successful testing. I will leave out my Master Plan; after all, what's the point in being a megalomaniac if you share the master plan?

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How do you Dev?