
Ask HN: How do you restart a coding project after vacation? - headShrinker
Imagine you are coding a fairly complex payment system with 6 or so classes, invoicing, payment confirmation, email messaging, due date tracking, etc. Memorial day comes and you leave your code as a series of half completed read and write methods, getters and setters, and some buggy calculations, briefly commented. When you come back, you are at a loss on how to restart. This is what happened to me and it&#x27;s taking all day to get my head back in to it.<p>How do you come back to a coding project after being away from it for more than a few days?
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greenyoda
_" How do you come back to a coding project after being away from it for more
than a few days?"_

I keep a log of what I'm working on, including to-do items (each of which get
expanded into subtasks when I start working on it), next steps, questions to
be resolved, ideas for future work, summaries of design discussions, etc. This
gives me some context that I can look at when I go back to a task (whether
it's after a short interruption like a meeting or a several-day long absence).
I maintain this log as a plain text file that I keep open in my editor.

Another advantage of having a permanent, searchable log is being able to go
back and figure out why I did something in the past.

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nwrk
try overcoming the overwhelming :-) by breaking it down to smaller tasks /
steps

\+ simpler mental model

\+ simpler code

reward yourself with small completed goals. take it easy!

