Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…For me, I don’t know if there’s a one project I can point to, but I can point to a specific spot where I think it happens and where I think you can learn a lot from. Any small program you write will be somewhere between 1,000 to 5,000 lines of code I consider a pretty dang small project. You can correlate this to any feature within a larger system as well. A specific feature on a website could be a thousand lines, a couple thousand lines. There’s a point in which all of your choices add up. And I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code. The choices you’ve made either weigh you down or kind of free you up. And so it’s right in that, that I feel like I learned the most is because I love getting to that point in a project or in some small part of the code base because at that point I get to test, A, how good were my initial gut decisions about how I designed the software, but B, now I need to go back and think about how am I going to do testing across this in a more effective way? How can I scale this out to 20,000 lines of code? How can I do all these things with what I’ve got or do I need to kind of rethink it? And I find that that’s really where the best learning happens is that everybody has probably a different number that exists, and as you go to each one of these numbers or how well or holistic you want your project to be, I think that you’ll come up with different numbers. And I think that number should just get bigger as you get more experienced. Because there’s projects that are a million lines of code, but they’re most certainly not holistic, right? Every part of the code base is some age at some capsule of time with some sort of programming style. Some is more functional, more class-based, more, God help your soul if it’s pre-processor macros in C++. There’s all these different kind of things you’ll find throughout time. And so that’s why I try to think about it as the feature or the thing you’re working on. It’s usually about 5,000 lines is where I find that things get kind of, did I make good or bad decisions? And that’s where I do all my learning is right on that phase. I’m trying to get it to the point where I should be able to shoot from the hip and do 20,000 lines and not be upset about it. So first of all, just enjoying the thing you create part, yeah. About there you can sit back and see all the parts dancing together. For me, also debugging, you get to see the choices you make materialize as how easy it is to debug. I’m a big proponent, I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, I put asserts everywhere. No, you are the reason why I do that.…

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