fromNedbatchelder
2 days agoSoftware development
Side project advice
Use side projects to choose coding standards, practice preferred workflows, and forgive yourself for rewrites; adapt code quality to goals and context.
But software evolves. Most open-source software used in research is refined both iteratively and collectively, and has no published 'version of record'. Updates can target various versions and releases, meaning that each aspect of the software - the project as a whole, a specific version or a single file - can require a different way to refer to it. This creates confusion.