Started skipping error messages at a hackathon last spring and ended up with a totally different workflow now

At the Boston Hackathon in March, a teammate told me to just ignore every red squiggle for the first hour and it actually helped me finish the MVP faster. But now I'm wondering if that's just building bad habits - anyone else have to unlearn shortcuts like that once you got serious about coding?

3 comments

3 Comments

wrenh6528d ago

The part about "ignoring every red squiggle" is honestly fine for hackathons. Those things are supposed to be chaotic sprints, not polished code. The real problem is if you keep doing it when you're building something that needs to actually work for more than a weekend. I ended up in a similar spot after a few hackathons. I got so used to skipping warnings that I started ignoring real bugs. It took me a while to retrain myself to actually read errors again instead of just blindly shipping code. You can do both. Turn off the linter for the first thirty minutes of a jam session to keep flow, then go back and clean up. That's not a bad habit, it's just knowing when to be fast and when to be careful.

tarag2828d ago

20 lines of code don't need a linter.

leo61225d ago

Depends on the 20 lines though. If it's something that's gonna get deployed or handed off to someone else, skipping the linter is just asking for trouble later. But if it's a one-off script you're gonna run once and delete, then yeah who cares. The habits you build in small things carry over to big things though. That's the part that worries me more than the linter itself.